Achieving mono compatable mixes? mastering and mix down

[kev herb]

id love to say fuck mono but all pro tunes convert well to mono and i belive its important for my tunes to do the same. but have part of your mix not work in mono could happen right at sound design stage. its almost as if to say stay in mono more than stereo during production. i also think width is achieved in wide elements by their comparrison to the central elements (if you make everything wide the mix sounds flat but with the addition of no power)

width in stereo and great sound in mono seems to be the holy grail but i havent totally got it yet. i think mid/side processing helps but if you rely too heavyly on it to get width to the point that the side channels become vital to the overall sound when summed to mono they will dissapeare.

[cbentley]

its bugging me more and more these days when i check my mixes in mono and elements lose their power or sheen that i have worked to achieve. the main issue on something im working on at the moment are my synths.i ve used 6 instances of sylenth to create supersawish anthemic melody using harmonies not dissimilar to the sound at 02:00 on the youtube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrO5sIoS ... ure=relmfu (i found this tune when looking for one in a similar style so i could reference against it)

when realizing the mono problem with my tune i bought the reference tune so i could get it into ableton and see whats going on in theirs mono wise. so i chucked a utility on it and turned the width to 0 and hardy anything changed level wise! so i turned the width to 200 to see whats on the sides and there is stuff on the sides but not a huge amount? yet i dont seem to miss it when when its mono yet the track sounds quite wide when plays in normal stereo?????

Just gave the You Tube version of your reference track a quick listen and that synth stab is pretty much dead center. I hear reverb at the sides. A bit brighter on the right for some reason or it's the encoding or I'm going deaf in my left ear (which might be true as well). When you collapse this to mono it's going to still sound solid without washing out or chorusing.

Be sure to read up on the Haas Effect.