I'm up late working on a song right now, and I'm really in love with how the mix sounds. But when I flip the switch to audition the track in mono, it sounds different.
Specifically, when listening to my saw stack synth, it sounds like a bit of the reverb is cut due to phasing issues, making it sound shorter and weaker. Also, the RMS value of the dry track goes down by about 1db when I switch between mono and stereo.
For another test, I flipped between mono and stereo while only listening through one ear of my headphones. When going mono, I could hear a noticeable (but not that bad) drop in the high end, and the whole track seemed to become a tad more dull (though possibly due to the loss of high freqs.)
Side note for those of you who monitor in Ozone or similar: the Correlation Trace graph averages about 75% to the +1 (good) side during most points of the song, save a few negative spikes here and there that I'm not worried about. However, in a couple of the breaks, where there's not much going on besides a couple stereo synths, it dips into the negative. From what I can tell, though, there doesn't seem to be much of a notable difference between mono and stereo when listening to this section, besides the previously mentioned loss of reverb energy.
I understand that when switching to mono, I'm obviously going to lose a lot of the feeling of being in a space with these instruments. But I want my mix to sound as good as it can on all systems, whether it be a large venue, or someone's mono Bluetooth speaker. Should I compromise the stereo width of my song to make it sound better in mono? How can I achieve a great-sounding stereo image without running into phasing issues?
Submitted April 26, 2017 at 04:05AM by ProfXavier https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/67mji1/how_much_should_i_worry_about_how_my_track_sounds/?utm_source=ifttt
Javier Rodriguez
Wednesday, April 26, 2017