Thank you for making this, the algorithm finally sent me here. I have been struggling lately about this exact issue, I'll make some crazy rip apart the world sound only for it to fall apart completely when I do the mono test. With these new tools and information I am going to reanalyze so many wips. If nothing else, it has me interested in music again. Subscribed.
that’s awesome I’m so glad this could spark some inspiration!! only thing I’d warn about this method is that since it gets rid of any changes in phase in the wavetables, it can make sounds boring in many cases. so be sure to find ways keep things interesting & not dull! if you make anything cool in your experimentation please come back and let me know, I’d love to listen!!
I personally found a system for making stereo sounds that is simple and headache free. It definitely isn't as precise as what you're presenting here though. I would call it "Fake mid-side". I put a layer device on bitwig, one layer leaves the sound clean, in the other I just put a very short delay with a value below 6ms, and I flip the phase on either the L or R channel with the tool device. Depending on the situation, I put a high-pass filter or just a little high-pitched comb filtering. If you look at it through the correlometer it's bad, but if you put the sound in mono you only get the untouched clean signal, all the rest disappears, so it does what it shoulds: it generates a stereo signal that leaves a clean sounding center sound.
right, that's the dimension expander trick. it's basically the opposite of the technique I show here. with this video's technique, each frequency does minimal phase cancellation when summed to mono, since the left and right add rather than subtract from one another. but with the dimension expander trick you're doing the maximum possible phase cancellation when summing to mono since the left and right signals are completely opposite. at least the wet portion. I haven't collected my thoughts too thoroughly on this, but here's what I'm thinking: at face value, saying that "in mono you only get the untouched clean signal" sounds like a good thing. but I think there's more to it. it might actually be a bad thing. to me, mono compatibility is all about making sure the relative level of all the sounds, and all of the sound's individual frequencies stay the same compared to one another. if my kick is 3dB louder than my synth chords in stereo, I also want it to be 3dB louder than the chords in mono. if the ~100hz range of my bass sits at the same level as my hi hats in stereo, I want them to have that same relative levelling in mono. so if you have a kick drum which is 100% mono, its level won't change at all in mono. but if you have synth chords with a dimension expander effect mixed in heavily, the chords might drop down something like 6dB below where it was in stereo. now in mono you're getting a whole lot of kick and not a lot of chord. so if you're dimension expanding literally every element in your whole mix, your mono compatibility will be perfect. in mono, the effect will simply go away. but of course you're not going to add dimension expander to the whole mix. you'll always have sounds that are wider or more mono than others. my tentative thought is: in relation to a fully mono sound, the worst thing you can do to a sound is add a dimension expander style effect, because it will get significantly quieter in relation to your mono sound when played back in mono. but I need to think more about this. @personaignota
@@jshstuff I didnt' think about it in those terms. I think the difference is of about 3db or slightly more, but that's still a noticeable difference, if you were to apply this to every single track the cumulative effect would be drastic. I must say I use this technique only with certain kinds of sounds, mostly recorded ones, and usually I don't expect a big, stereo sound to come out of it, because it will sound weird, pretty much like when you increase the width to 200%, it's wide but hollow. Mid/Side recording is used to get a stereo sound with a very focused center, so it's pretty common for rhythm guitars, piano, even minimally mic'ed drums, and similar. So I use it when I need some strong fundamental track that mainly serves the purpose of driving the track forward without having it get lost in the dead-center void. It's focused, but not "small" compared to the rest. I personally work a lot with samples, so I'm always trying to find a way to have them wide, or wider, without destroying mono compatibility or have it sound phasey. This solution isn't "it", but it works well enough on a number of cases.
Dude! I am blown away . Glad I found your channel .🤩 Three Question though. 1.What about when we add noise to the same sound . How should I process that or i should use separate intance of serum ? 2. Talking about phase Knob and random knob in general. should i always keep random knob to 0 , so that phase randomness never occur in any kind of sound not talking about bass only? 3.If any sound has random phase going on, won't it affect when all sounds are summed up on master? When and when not to use random knob in sound design, any information on that.
Thank you very much! It's really helpful! Keep up these videos. They are amazing! Good job! I am wondering if there is a way to do it with Sylenth1. If it's possible, I would be happy to see a tutorial from you. :) Thanks a lot! 🔥🔥
I’m glad they’re helpful! Recently I’ve been thinking of putting out a few more videos. hmmm, I haven’t used sylenth before but I have a feeling you can’t do the exact same technique since this is mainly for wavetable synths. if I find anything out I’ll let you know!
Is this a thing in other synths? any ableton ones? phaseplant, vital? I have serum but here are some more video ideas. I am sure people will love that if you can teach more about wide bass lmao its a treasure my dude
maybe! try finding a setting in another plugin’s wavetable editor equivalent to “set phases from other osc” but if you can’t find it, you could probably do this phase matching in serum then export the wavetables to another synth.
In Vital you don't even have to use unison. There is a modulator in the same section as velocity, note, lift etc. called "stereo". It basically creates a modulation where channels are hard panned left and right. It is great because you can assign it to any parameter and if you have full control over amount, which you can also modulate with LFO or macro. If you want to change the polarity of effect, aka flip left and right sides, then just make modulation negative.
that's a trickier situation. you could still try doing the same process but in this case it might take the life out of the sound by using this video's technique, since this technique normalizes the phases of all the harmonics across the whole wavetable. and in many cases this inconsistent phase is what makes a sound interesting. so go ahead and try matching the phases between oscillator A and B and see if it works good. but if it doesn't, try re-making it from scratch using this technique. and if that doesn't sound good, then I guess you can HP the sub and replace it with a sine wave so at least that part's mono compatible. make of that what you will 🤷♂️
Might be a really dumb Q, but let's say I have a bunch of supersaws, and I apply this to all instances of the supersaws - would this make the supersaws wider/also mono-compatible, or is the phase in supersaws desirable enough that some cancellation is okay and this technique isn't needed?
good question, yeah it would work and make it mono compatible for sure. the standard serum 7x unison supersaws are super super bad for mono. but supersaws might sound boring if you use this technique on them, because I think much of what makes supersaws sound good is the chaotic noisiness of the phasing. but you should try it out. but remember that this technique only works if you have different harmonic content in the left and right oscillators. maybe try doing a square on the left and a saw on the right since their harmonics are different. I have a hunch that it'll just sound weird and off-balance for supersaws though. to remedy the phase issues, I usually do normal unison supersaws but I go to serum's global tab and dial the unison widths down to 80, 60 or 40 percent depending on how wide I need the sound to be. sure it makes it sound a bit less massive in stereo but it avoids the issue where they sound 3-5db quieter in mono than stereo.
@@jshstuff Wow, I have never gotten this detailed of a response, ever! I can’t thank you enough for this valuable input. Can’t remember ever hitting the ‘sub’ button so fast in my life.💨
probably just be aware of whether you have multiple sounds taking up the same frequencies, if they conflict and cause phase issues either adjust your arrangement so they don’t, or sidechain compress the more important sound to the other. if they’re really simple or repetitive sounds like kick/basses you’re talking about then you could open an oscilloscope and phase align them so they sum together instead of cancel each other. to me the main issue is detecting the conflicting layers in the first place, once I know the issue, there are usually a number of pretty simple options I can choose to fix it.
@@jshstuff Is it ok to use phasing sounds that are stacked on other layers in an overall mix to create a width perspective? ex. Using Haas on one of the layers while keeping everything else in phase. Or is it essential to always stay in phase and use the Haas type of phasing lightly?
the way I think of it is: I want the balance of all the instruments in my mixes to be roughly the same loudness when played in both stereo and mono. but any instrument/layer whose L/R channels are out of phase will become significantly quieter when I play them in mono, so I try to stay away from stuff like haas entirely since it will make a given sound quieter relative to my other sounds with good stereo phase. but it’s interesting, you’re talking about having just one layer of many that has some bad/destructive stereo phasing, so it might not be a big deal, because you have a bunch of other sounds playing that same thing. so you should try it - haas effect some layers and listen really critically to the whole mix in both mono and stereo to see if you can hear that instrument/layer fall quieter in the mix when you’re in mono, if it starts to disappear too much then you probably shouldn’t haas it, or you should mix the effect in more subtly.
but also don’t forget that the haas effect is weird in mono in general because you’re playing the same thing twice with a really short delay between them, which makes a comb filter, so it’ll cause even more problems for your mono than volume drop offs, you’ll have weird accentuated frequencies and stuff
This is nuts, and deserves way more views! This is the best method I’ve seen, and something I would have never thought to do.
I’m glad!
We should find a way to just put this on our entire master chain
Thank you for making this, the algorithm finally sent me here. I have been struggling lately about this exact issue, I'll make some crazy rip apart the world sound only for it to fall apart completely when I do the mono test. With these new tools and information I am going to reanalyze so many wips. If nothing else, it has me interested in music again. Subscribed.
that’s awesome I’m so glad this could spark some inspiration!! only thing I’d warn about this method is that since it gets rid of any changes in phase in the wavetables, it can make sounds boring in many cases. so be sure to find ways keep things interesting & not dull!
if you make anything cool in your experimentation please come back and let me know, I’d love to listen!!
im so glad i stumbled upon ur channel! this is state-of-the-art sound design bro! big love
Your videos are amazing. You explain things in such a practical way and you're so calm without hype, stories or corni jokes. Lol
your videos are insanly helpful, keep it up!
I personally found a system for making stereo sounds that is simple and headache free. It definitely isn't as precise as what you're presenting here though. I would call it "Fake mid-side". I put a layer device on bitwig, one layer leaves the sound clean, in the other I just put a very short delay with a value below 6ms, and I flip the phase on either the L or R channel with the tool device. Depending on the situation, I put a high-pass filter or just a little high-pitched comb filtering. If you look at it through the correlometer it's bad, but if you put the sound in mono you only get the untouched clean signal, all the rest disappears, so it does what it shoulds: it generates a stereo signal that leaves a clean sounding center sound.
right, that's the dimension expander trick. it's basically the opposite of the technique I show here. with this video's technique, each frequency does minimal phase cancellation when summed to mono, since the left and right add rather than subtract from one another. but with the dimension expander trick you're doing the maximum possible phase cancellation when summing to mono since the left and right signals are completely opposite. at least the wet portion.
I haven't collected my thoughts too thoroughly on this, but here's what I'm thinking:
at face value, saying that "in mono you only get the untouched clean signal" sounds like a good thing. but I think there's more to it. it might actually be a bad thing.
to me, mono compatibility is all about making sure the relative level of all the sounds, and all of the sound's individual frequencies stay the same compared to one another. if my kick is 3dB louder than my synth chords in stereo, I also want it to be 3dB louder than the chords in mono. if the ~100hz range of my bass sits at the same level as my hi hats in stereo, I want them to have that same relative levelling in mono.
so if you have a kick drum which is 100% mono, its level won't change at all in mono. but if you have synth chords with a dimension expander effect mixed in heavily, the chords might drop down something like 6dB below where it was in stereo. now in mono you're getting a whole lot of kick and not a lot of chord.
so if you're dimension expanding literally every element in your whole mix, your mono compatibility will be perfect. in mono, the effect will simply go away. but of course you're not going to add dimension expander to the whole mix. you'll always have sounds that are wider or more mono than others.
my tentative thought is: in relation to a fully mono sound, the worst thing you can do to a sound is add a dimension expander style effect, because it will get significantly quieter in relation to your mono sound when played back in mono.
but I need to think more about this.
@personaignota
@@jshstuff I didnt' think about it in those terms. I think the difference is of about 3db or slightly more, but that's still a noticeable difference, if you were to apply this to every single track the cumulative effect would be drastic. I must say I use this technique only with certain kinds of sounds, mostly recorded ones, and usually I don't expect a big, stereo sound to come out of it, because it will sound weird, pretty much like when you increase the width to 200%, it's wide but hollow.
Mid/Side recording is used to get a stereo sound with a very focused center, so it's pretty common for rhythm guitars, piano, even minimally mic'ed drums, and similar. So I use it when I need some strong fundamental track that mainly serves the purpose of driving the track forward without having it get lost in the dead-center void. It's focused, but not "small" compared to the rest.
I personally work a lot with samples, so I'm always trying to find a way to have them wide, or wider, without destroying mono compatibility or have it sound phasey. This solution isn't "it", but it works well enough on a number of cases.
This video is absolute gold man, keep making content like you are teaching insane stuff
I’m glad!! I will anytime I feel like I have something good to share
All your videos are great! keep doing more ❤
this video is insane and really helpfull ! You should make more video like this !!
I'm glad you liked it!!
Amazing video man very useful!
Outstanding video. 🔥
Awesome job on this video, keep doing this stuff 😎
😎
So good!!! Thank you so much
Amazing tutorial
i don't use too many synths in my tracks but great video! will definitely keep this in mind whenever I get around to designing more sounds
glhf!!
Huge thank you to
Amazing tips!
Amazing Video!!
Dude! I am blown away . Glad I found your channel .🤩
Three Question though.
1.What about when we add noise to the same sound .
How should I process that or i should use separate intance of serum ?
2. Talking about phase Knob and random knob in general. should i always keep random knob to 0 , so that phase randomness never occur in any kind of sound not talking about bass only?
3.If any sound has random phase going on, won't it affect when all sounds are summed up on master?
When and when not to use random knob in sound design, any information on that.
great vid, been wondering how to do this for a while
Thank you very much! It's really helpful! Keep up these videos. They are amazing! Good job! I am wondering if there is a way to do it with Sylenth1. If it's possible, I would be happy to see a tutorial from you. :) Thanks a lot! 🔥🔥
I’m glad they’re helpful! Recently I’ve been thinking of putting out a few more videos.
hmmm, I haven’t used sylenth before but I have a feeling you can’t do the exact same technique since this is mainly for wavetable synths. if I find anything out I’ll let you know!
@@jshstuff Oh can't wait for your videos! And thank you very much!
this is sick - i wonder how this works on plucky big melody synths
Thanks!
Is this a thing in other synths? any ableton ones? phaseplant, vital? I have serum but here are some more video ideas. I am sure people will love that if you can teach more about wide bass lmao its a treasure my dude
maybe! try finding a setting in another plugin’s wavetable editor equivalent to “set phases from other osc”
but if you can’t find it, you could probably do this phase matching in serum then export the wavetables to another synth.
In Vital you don't even have to use unison. There is a modulator in the same section as velocity, note, lift etc. called "stereo".
It basically creates a modulation where channels are hard panned left and right. It is great because you can assign it to any parameter and if you have full control over amount, which you can also modulate with LFO or macro.
If you want to change the polarity of effect, aka flip left and right sides, then just make modulation negative.
clicked this video because i thought the thumbnail was talking about fallout 4 mods
Huge, thank you
you’re welcome!
awesome
thank u so much
u r welcome
You may be the goat
no u
omg this is scary nice
ok this is cool
i love u man
I love you too
@@jshstuff iam not under the flag thou...i love u for sharing this awesome idea. :))
My fucking god, what a beauty!!! Thank you!
you’re welcome :)
What about when I already have a patch made inside Serum that doesn't sound good in mono, but I don't want to change its timbre for that?
that's a trickier situation. you could still try doing the same process but in this case it might take the life out of the sound by using this video's technique, since this technique normalizes the phases of all the harmonics across the whole wavetable. and in many cases this inconsistent phase is what makes a sound interesting. so go ahead and try matching the phases between oscillator A and B and see if it works good. but if it doesn't, try re-making it from scratch using this technique. and if that doesn't sound good, then I guess you can HP the sub and replace it with a sine wave so at least that part's mono compatible.
make of that what you will 🤷♂️
Mindblowing woooooooow! Hahahahaha thanks a lot!!
you’re welcome!
Might be a really dumb Q, but let's say I have a bunch of supersaws, and I apply this to all instances of the supersaws - would this make the supersaws wider/also mono-compatible, or is the phase in supersaws desirable enough that some cancellation is okay and this technique isn't needed?
good question, yeah it would work and make it mono compatible for sure. the standard serum 7x unison supersaws are super super bad for mono. but supersaws might sound boring if you use this technique on them, because I think much of what makes supersaws sound good is the chaotic noisiness of the phasing. but you should try it out. but remember that this technique only works if you have different harmonic content in the left and right oscillators. maybe try doing a square on the left and a saw on the right since their harmonics are different.
I have a hunch that it'll just sound weird and off-balance for supersaws though.
to remedy the phase issues, I usually do normal unison supersaws but I go to serum's global tab and dial the unison widths down to 80, 60 or 40 percent depending on how wide I need the sound to be. sure it makes it sound a bit less massive in stereo but it avoids the issue where they sound 3-5db quieter in mono than stereo.
@@jshstuff Wow, I have never gotten this detailed of a response, ever! I can’t thank you enough for this valuable input.
Can’t remember ever hitting the ‘sub’ button so fast in my life.💨
😃
Wondering how you would fix phase issues while stacking different sounds together....do you have any advice on this?
probably just be aware of whether you have multiple sounds taking up the same frequencies, if they conflict and cause phase issues either adjust your arrangement so they don’t, or sidechain compress the more important sound to the other. if they’re really simple or repetitive sounds like kick/basses you’re talking about then you could open an oscilloscope and phase align them so they sum together instead of cancel each other.
to me the main issue is detecting the conflicting layers in the first place, once I know the issue, there are usually a number of pretty simple options I can choose to fix it.
@@jshstuff Is it ok to use phasing sounds that are stacked on other layers in an overall mix to create a width perspective? ex. Using Haas on one of the layers while keeping everything else in phase. Or is it essential to always stay in phase and use the Haas type of phasing lightly?
the way I think of it is: I want the balance of all the instruments in my mixes to be roughly the same loudness when played in both stereo and mono. but any instrument/layer whose L/R channels are out of phase will become significantly quieter when I play them in mono, so I try to stay away from stuff like haas entirely since it will make a given sound quieter relative to my other sounds with good stereo phase. but it’s interesting, you’re talking about having just one layer of many that has some bad/destructive stereo phasing, so it might not be a big deal, because you have a bunch of other sounds playing that same thing. so you should try it - haas effect some layers and listen really critically to the whole mix in both mono and stereo to see if you can hear that instrument/layer fall quieter in the mix when you’re in mono, if it starts to disappear too much then you probably shouldn’t haas it, or you should mix the effect in more subtly.
but also don’t forget that the haas effect is weird in mono in general because you’re playing the same thing twice with a really short delay between them, which makes a comb filter, so it’ll cause even more problems for your mono than volume drop offs, you’ll have weird accentuated frequencies and stuff
@@jshstuff Awesome insight bro I really appreciate it, this has already improved my mixes Thank you!
new sub here..