All about the Mid/Side

It’s here !

Do you have tips and tricks using M/S Mix ?
On which instruments (Drums, Kick, Snare, HH, Vocals, Guitars, Bass, Synths, Pads, Violins ....) you teat in M/S ?
On the bus mix ?
What processing for the stereo side, Comp, EQ, Saturation, Reverb... ?
If you know good videos with M/S techniques, share the links.
Your favorite plugins for the M/S ?

Thank you in advance to all those who will come to share their M/S knowledge

 

Kick, Snare, Bass, Vocals, Guitar Solos, should be 100% Mid, Toms, Percussion, Cymbals, Rhythmic Guitars, most of Delays and Reverbs Should be on the Sides...

EQ compression is element based, does not care if the signal is Mid or Side.

for now this is what comes in mind.

 

I generally use quite a bit of M/S EQ to make room for other sounds, so that there is less overlapping in M and S. I use Apqualizr2 or Pro-Q2.
Just be aware that the sides gets cancelled out when listening/summed to mono.

Also imagine the spectral balance to (generally) be in a V shape, with the low-end in the bottom (Mid/mono) and the highs at the top (Sides).

 

Last edited: Sep 15, 2018 at 10:14 AM

Some already know it, some don't: MID is Mono on a stereo channel, but because SIDE is calculated as

minus

(Think of a Stereo signal on two Mono mixer channels, both panned to center, but one of them *phase-inverted* => The result on the master channel is the SIDE signal) is not necessarily a Mono signal panned outside the center.
If you take a Mono signal, pan it slightly to the left and invert the phase of one channel, it's still Stereo with a higher "Side" amount but it's unlike the panned Mono signal.
The latter signal has a good chance of being killed or too low in level when listened to on Mono audio equipment that usually adds left and right channels to mix down to Mono.
To make sure that doesn't happen you can use a correlation meter ("Stereo Meter") that has a bar graph with center=Mono, left=phase-inverted, right=Stereo) or even a more modern frequency-dependent XY-display that can show you what frequency areas have what correlation between them, to easier isolate potentially problematic Stereo sounds in your mix.
The higher the amount of phase-inverted Stereo you see, the more likely you'll get issues on Mono equipment.

Using a Mid/Side-capable EQ for example, you can get very interesting effects on Stereo signals by applying different EQ curves to the MID and to the SIDE channels. But like said, make sure you check the result in a correlation meter (or just listen to your mix on Mono equipment from time to time which isn't a bad idea anyway).​

 

When I write too much text, others are faster to reply

 

You really need to learn about Left to right direction for typing things in English