External Instruments stereo recording behaves as mono!

[markllo3]

Hello everybody!

Here is an issue that is driving me crazy!
I am trying to record a piano using two microphones (through a FireWire external sound card with two XLR input) and I would like to route them into a stereo channel. This is what I am doing:

1) I create an audio track
2) I set up Audio from: Ext. In, 1/2.

The problem is that the stereo channel only gives me the sound of Microphone 2, behaving in fact as a mono channel! The weird fact is that the meter shows both signals from Mic 1 and Mic 2! If instead of a stereo channel I create two separate mono channels with Mic 1 and Mic 2 separately, everything works fine....

I excluded any malfunctioning of microphones or sound card, everything works perfectly. There must be something within Ableton that I am missing. Anybody can shed a light on this weird case?!? Any help is highly appreciated

[Richie Witch]

Personally, I'd leave them as two mono channels so that you can adjust the stereo spread yourself. This is going to be essential if you decide to move the piano from the center of the stereo field. Without being able to pan the two channels separately, you'll just end up attenuating one side or the other, rather than moving the sound as a composite whole. That's just the nature of the pan knob in most DAWs.

If you really feel compelled to create a stereo piano track, I'd route two mono tracks, one for each mic, and panned accordingly, and routed to a stereo channel. Essentially, you're recording three channels at once: the two individual mics and a composite stereo channel.

With this technique, you still won't be able to pan your stereo piano track from the center without a special panning tool, or by blending all three channels together on a bus with each channel tweaked to place the piano in the right spot on your virtual stage. BTW, Waves makes a good true-panning plugin that I use specifically for piano in situations like this.

Mid/side recording is similar. You could record them as a single composite signal, but you get vastly better control of the stereo field if you record them as individual inputs and then adjust their gain individually.