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So you have your red and your white cables. The easiest way to think of this is, think of an RCA cable.
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Stereo to Mono ConversionĪs we can see in Figure 1, we have our left and right channels. This isolates the left and right signals and then joins them together to form one output that you can send to the sound board.
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One way to fix this is by using a stereo to mono summing circuit. If you add that up that is 8 different connections into the board for 4 devices! If your church has a smaller format audio console, those add up quick and take up your channels! At NRCC we have a computer, iPhone/MP3 player, CD Player, and DVD player. Most churches require a lot of media devices to play from. With a mono audio system you combine the left and right channels inside the sound board to send to your speakers thus eliminating any stereo feed and summing them into a single mono feed. On a sound board, to get these media devices connected, you have to use a stereo channel or two mono channels (one for left and one for right). Our room doesn’t have a good shape for everyone to get a good stereo feed, so mono it is.Īlmost every CD player, computer, MP3 player or media player is in stereo. Mono meaning that there is no left or right, there is just the one point source that we hear audio from. Who knows, you might just be blown away.At North Ridge Community Church in our Worship Center we have a mono system. Some people find LCR to be a revelation, while others don’t care for it. I think that’s fine, although for consistency, if you’re doing an album or EP or other multi-song project, you probably should either use it or not, rather than changing your approach from track to track. You might end up using it a lot, or maybe just occasionally. Think of LCR panning as another tool in your mixing arsenal. However, it’s really a case-by-case decision. In my experience, the technique works better on full-band arrangements, as opposed to a very small ensemble. It depends on the content of the session. Not every project will sound better as an LCR mix. The mono lead guitar track is panned left (although I could have put it in the center or all the way to the right), the two mono rhythm guitars are panned left and right and the shaker is panned all the way right. The keyboard, also a stereo pair is also panned hard left and right. The lead vocal is up the middle, and the two harmony vocal tracks are panned left and right. The kick and snare are panned to the center, while the overheads (which were recorded as a stereo pair) are panned left and right.
#Switch audio converter left to right pro
(Click on the image to enlarge.)Īny other mono tracks should be placed hard to either side, and you should try to achieve a rough balance, level wise, between left and right.Īs an example, I’ve included a screen shot that shows you a session in Logic Pro X with LCR panning. You could choose to pan a stereo track all the way to one side or the other, if it sounds good, although you’ll lose it’s stereo effect.Ĭheck out the panning in this LCR session. Pro Tools is different, with separate left and right pan knobs for stereo tracks). Stereo recorded track pairs and other stereo tracks should be panned hard left and right (on most DAWs, achieving the latter means leaving the pan pot for a stereo track at 12 o’clock. Like with a conventional panning strategy, kick, snare, bass and lead vocals or featured instruments should be panned up the middle in an LCR mix. For instance, use high-pass filtering to get rid of low frequencies that are adding clutter. Cutting unnecessary frequencies for instruments or voices helps in that regard. So how do you change your approach when panning LCR? It does require that you utilize your EQ skills more in order to carve out niches for elements sharing the same panning position. And don’t forget, there’s still information in those in-between portions, just not as much as in a standard-panned mix. There was some room for the mix to breathe, rather than it being a wall of sound. I was working on a project with some relatively large mixes - between 30 and 40 tracks per song - and when I started to apply the LCR principles, everything seemed to open up a great deal. But I tried it and have found it to be a really useful technique. I was a doubter myself when I first heard about it. People are skeptical about it, and some actively dislike the LCR concept, if recording forums are any indication.
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For example, instead of a lead guitar that’s panned a little bit off center, you would pan it either directly to center, or hard left or hard right, and that extreme positioning can be more dramatic for the listener.
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