Hello. And welcome to another episode of Inside the recording studio. I am Jody Whitesides and with me as always is Mr. Chris Hellstrom. How are you today, Chris? Spectacular. You know, that reminds me of the movie Larry crown I am spectacular, Jody. How are you? Yeah, maybe that's overstating a little bit, but I'm good. Yeah. for some reason. Yeah, he says that word a lot. Apparently in the movie. Good for you.
Does he? I have to plead complete ignorance about that movie, so I'll just continue with the podcast. Yes, let's do that. Off the rails already. What are we talking about today? Yes, yes, we are. We're gonna dip our toes into the wonderful world and mysterious world of mid-side processing, primarily EQ today. There will be some deep sort of [silence] technical stuff I think that we will cover more importantly perhaps how we
might go about using it. Should we use it? Is it something that we have to use and hopefully we'll answer at least a couple of those questions by the end of this. Tell us a little bit about mid-side processing and where that comes from, Jerry. It derives from a miking technique that was developed by Alan Blumlein. All right. So. What it is, is he would take a cardioid mic and he would point it at the source.
And then he would take a second mic with a figure eight pattern and point that at a 90 degree angle away from the source that would capture the sides of everything happening around the source, so to speak. So the mid mic was the cardioid mic that captured everything. [ And the side mic, which was at 90 degrees in a figure eight pattern, captured all the directionality of the sound. That's where it stems from. Yeah, so the cardio is obviously really directional toward the sound that hears Mikey.
Source, yeah. Do the miking technique or EQing mid and side? Yeah, exactly. Okay. Why would we want to do this? [ [ That's two different, very different things. The idea there is that with miking like that, it gets you a very stereo-opic idea of where your sound source is coming from because you get the sound source and you hear it very noise] clearly in the in the main mid of channel and then your sides are determining where it's located in your room essentially. Right.
So you get a very focused sound while still capturing some of the space and still getting clarity and that's presumably why Mr. Bloomline would do this back in what was it like 30s I think right at EMI something like that yeah what that does It was a while ago.
Or for something that was recorded is obviously gives us a little bit more control over our track and we should point out probably early in this that we're dealing with stereo tracks this is not an issue obviously for for a mono track right using the two mic technique from Alan ( ( audio in that you have two separate tracks to deal with when you're miking that way. ) I can't confess to saying that I would ever think about miking in this format.
Yeah, so you obviously have a lot more control over the source that you're capturing at that point. But now when we're dealing with all the wonderful tools that we have today and we're doing recordings in our DAW and stuff, do you ever mic in this way or do you just do that? Should you need it in the box? box because I haven't I've never miked anything like that because I've never had the need to essentially right It's not a miking thing to me. For me, it's a processing thing.
And that's probably how it is for a whole lot of people yeah I would agree with that I don't do a whole lot of mid-side I know the out there at this point. Mm-hmm. benefit of it. Personally, I don't come across it a lot. It's something that I (laughs) predominantly think of when it comes to mastering. I don't do a whole lot of mastering, so it's not something that I experience a lot. We will go into it a (silence) little bit more how we might go ahead and use it in our project. Explain a Right.
little bit what happens there because now we're obviously we don't have two mics that are capturing this. So we're in our DAW and we have a stereo track. So tell us about . . .wyn. art artisankick custom So for most people, for most mix engineers and most mastering engineers, but we're gonna concentrate mostly on mixing at this point 'cause we'll leave mastering to the pros like Ruben Cohen. 1.exact Most mixing engineers are gonna be dealing with things . . . on a stereo field.
But most stereo files that they're either giving to somebody else or getting from somebody else for mixing are not going to be mid-side files. >> Right. Right. They're usually just a left and right file.
In order to use this in a plugin situation in a DAW, we're very fortunate in this day and age that handy dandy plugin manufacturers take care of the concept of converting left and right stereo files into something that can be dealt with in a mid-side generation that we might want to tackle it with. The simple nature of this [silence] with the plugin doing the conversion for us, mid is equal to the sum of both left and right.
It's not like it has divided the stereo left and right file into three sections where there's a left section for one third, a mid section in the middle third and a right section on the last third. That's not how it works. Right. Mid is actually the sum of both the left (laughs) and the right channels. (silence) And then it determines the sides by taking the left and subtracting the right is essentially how it's done in layman's terms for a plugin.
And what left becomes is mid plus side and right becomes mid minus side. Then the processing happens with the plugin and then it converts it back from the mid side that it's doing back into left and right. And it's kind of a complicated process. And that's the most simple way I can discuss it. (laughs) for us if we just kind of break it down to what's actually happening on even if Mm-hmm.
you don't really worry about what is happening of the math behind and in the plug-in is that we now have a little bit more control over what's happening in [Silence] the sites as well as what's going on in our track right up the center the process there's obviously a lot more convoluted than what I'm making it sound like but that's sort of the benefit of what we get. Hence the name, mid, inside. But there's a lot Mm-hmm [ Pause ]
more going on it's not like you said it just divides it up. Oh this stuff is in the left and this is in the right and that type of thing. What we get for example if we have a track, a stereo track, where presumably bass, kick, snare, lead vocal would generally be centered right up the middle. Hmm. and if they're bone dry, sort of like no reverbs or anything, they're going to be focused there so we can process those to the degree that we find useful and the same thing with the sides.
What are some of the things that we should keep in mind though when we are doing this process? Because I know if we just start willy-nilly experimenting with this and going kind of crazy we can very quickly get into some issues, can we not? So maybe expand a little bit on that. What's the difference between linear phase and just Oh yes, and the first big thing to keep in mind when using these type of plugins is phasing.
There's a whole lot of problems when it comes to phasing, especially if it's a plugin that is not specifically a linear phase EQ. It can introduce, well, linear phase EQ does a whole lot of complicated math to standard EQ. [ Pause ] to make sure that anything you do from one side to the other does not get bizzarely out of whack or out of time with whatever it is that you're adding or subtracting to in the EQ field and causing phasing issues.
Whereas other plugins that aren't explicitly linear phase type of plugins, and you mentioned a few just before we started recording Yeah, right. that there are some where you can do certain things with hardware types, EQ, emulations that kind of do this stuff. Yeah, right. Yeah. And then you start measuring like with the You can start introducing phase. And if you do something drastic in your EQing and it's not a linear phase EQ, you are probably causing phasing problems.
When it cops is down to mono, you might hear some real problems once you've done this. And this is one of the other things to keep in mind. You need to check your mix in mono when you start messing around with your mid sides. Right. benefits that you might get from the mid-side processing, is that worth what you might be losing in phase correlation perhaps on a mono system, right? Because we are messing with phase
Right. Especially if you collapse it down to mono and suddenly you're listening on say under the best of circumstances. Again, is the juice worth the squeeze, so to speak? It's something to be aware because again, I said we started here that it can feel really exciting. it's like, oh, look how wide I can get the symbols, or I can make all this stuff, right? And the end result might be not as pleasing as we might think it is at the time of we're sitting there tweaking willy-nilly, so.
Yeah, we did record overheads for this, right? a HomePod mini or something or an Amazon speaker or a Google speaker, suddenly there's no symbols as you were giving it as an example. I was like, where did my symbols go? (laughs) They were there, they're now gone because of phasing. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. And never mind all the issues that you might have.
Another thing to keep in mind that is the third portion to this of keeping things in mind when you're messing around with this type of EQ is your monitoring situation. If your monitors are not set up really well, you will likely miss all the little details that Mid-Side EQing can bring up in your processing. Right. regardless of mid-side, right? So we want to think about that setup of our speakers and our monitoring system as best as we can, wherever we are, right? If you're not...
What I did there is that you can't fix what you're not able to hear. Exactly. And if you're fucking around with shit and you can't hear it, Yeah, right. you're creating problems that shouldn't be there anyway. Right, and you might not have even had the problems Now that we've covered those three things, to begin with, so there is always that. [BLANK_AUDIO] we're going to take a word from our sponsors. And we're back. What's up next, Chris? Well, uses, I think, right?
(mumbles) We talked about the potential pitfalls of doing this kind of processing and I don't use it technically in every mix, that we wanna have our monitoring accurately tell us what we're actually doing to the tracks. But what are some of the cases where you might use mid-site? Because like I said, I don't use it a whole lot. I haven't used it some, but this is not something I use in every mix, for example.
(Laughter) [ Pause ] but I use it in a lot of mixes and it has a lot to do with my mixed template (Applause) in the way I've set it up. It makes it easier for me to deal with things . [ Pause ] in certain regards. And the first thing that I would like to impress upon people is that this is more of a stereo concept. [ Pause ] It's not something you bring to the table [ Pause ] with an individual instrument in my mind. I rarely, if ever, maybe one, not even one.
Let's go like 0.005% of the time I might use this on an individual stereo instrument. Generally speaking, this is on some sort of master bus and most often I'm using this on the master music bus, not the vocal bus, but the music bus. Yes, that is my general use for it. That's what I was going to ask you, would you use this on like your music bus or to kind of make room for vocals, that type of thing? Okay. [ Pause ] Now that's not everybody's general use, but it is my general use.
And one of the first things that I have to think about when I'm doing this is that I don't think about this type of EQing as something that's only affecting the mid when I'm doing the mids and only affecting the sides when I'm doing the sides. And we had a little bit of a discussion about how we each think of this as it's going on. With the mid processing of my musical bus, and if there's a little issue going on between the balance of the vocal .
and maybe it's getting stepped on [ Pause ] and usually my vocal is, especially the lead is setting up center. The music bus can sometimes get a little busy in a few spots. I will use mid-side processing on the music bus and I will scoop out in the mid area of about 2.1K, depending on the vocal, whether it's a male or female vocal, or the female vocal might be a little higher, male vocal might go a little lower.
And I might pull out one to maybe one and a half, [BLANK_AUDIO] maximum two dB on the mid. It's not a lot, but overall, when I do that, that's affecting everything across the board, regardless. Yeah. And to compensate for that a little bit, I will actually boost the sides a half dB in the same area. So the sides come up a little bit as the mid goes down. That creates a little bit of a pocket [BLANK_AUDIO] for that vocal to sit in. It can, yes.
Okay, so you're saying just to throw out some values here, right? You're on your music bus. And now it's definitely for you an issue with how dense the mix is. This is not one of those things where you just want to ride the vocal up a little bit. It's fighting against and it's masking.
So or the instrument is masking the vocal. So you're yeah, so you're pulling out one or two dB, (mumbles) you said in the mid and then correspondingly raising the sides on the music buzz in the same frequency for No, actually I usually do a little less. Probably about the same value one or two DB Okay I usually do a little less, just to kind of compensate, but not to, when you start cutting the mid, you're widening the frequency area.
And I don't mean mid EQ, like that's a weird thing about saying mid side, because it almost says like I'm cutting the mids. Yeah I'm not cutting the mids. Yeah, not the mid frequency that yeah, right I'm cutting the mid section on the EQ of whatever it is that I'm using to do this. And then I'm boosting the side, not mid frequency, but the mid of the value of [ Pause ]
everything. That's where some people get a little bit wishy washy, maybe in their formulation of what's going on is that they think if I just cut the mids, well, that's gonna do only the mids. And the reality is, and it's like that image that I showed you of what's happening. There is a concentration on the mid, but it affects everything overall. Whereas the left right affects the sides, but not so much the center. It's a delicate balance is what I would call it.
(laughs) Yeah, I would say just as a caution, I mean, we have to know what it is that we're trying to do first, right? Uh-huh. When we're using this type of processing and definitely Sure. Smaller changes here. I would say generally overall. It's not like you're gonna be superhanded here unless you're going crazy soundscapey sound design type of stuff, right? because And that's why I'm saying it can be anywhere from like maybe a dB to somewhere to almost [ Pause ] 2 dB.
It doesn't take a lot to create that pocket for the vocal. and that's generally my use of it, is how I'm using the mid side when it's needed. One other way to kind of think about this is I want to make this very clear to the listeners is that adjustments to the mid channel, as I mentioned, affect everything, including anything that's hard panned left, right. But adjustments to the side channels Yeah, I think it's one of those things you kind of have to hear it mess around with some as well.
affect everything except for elements that are literally dead center, if that makes any sense. ( audio cuts out) You do, but I just want to be clear that it's like the mid channel of this affects everything. you know because it... [ Pause ] It's not like it just affects, it's like I was saying at the up top. [ Pause ] It's not like there's a left third, middle third, right third, and it only affects the third and the middle.
It affects the middle of your mix a little bit more, but it affects everything overall, hard left and hard right elements. Whereas when you affect just side channels, side channels affect everything that aren't dead center in the exact opposite fashion. Right. Perhaps a good way of thinking about this, just to be careful with the processing that we're doing. Should it be possible? Is that perhaps if you're having to do this, to treat the sides first for whatever adjustments you might have.
So, right, of course. But let's say, as an example, now I'm thinking, and I could be completely wrong. Well, it depends on what you're treating for, right? Slap him across the forehead. wrong and if I'm wrong people tell me that I'm full of it right absolutely Mm hmm.
because I want to learn as well right let's say that you find that the mid is not present enough right as opposed to perhaps boosting some in the mid It could either way of doing that, it's going to cause that frequency area that you're affecting perhaps lowering the sides would make more sense [BLANK_AUDIO] to feel a little more narrow. Narrower, yeah, yeah. And that a lot of times is one of the things that we're trying to make it wider, right?
Yes. Sure. Especially if you're using it on a master bus, right? [BLANK_AUDIO] Because it can have that where you can boost a little bit in the sides of a high frequency and to make a little bit more excitement in there, perhaps even roll off some of the lows, if you can. Right. To make that feel a little bit wider and still have that punch of the middle of the kick and the snare and vocals and bass and all those kind of things that just live right down the middle. [silence]
- So the thing to remember on all of that that we were just talking about when it comes to these uses of thinking of the mid side is that it's never just as simple as the center and the sides. There's always some trade off that's happening in between everything that's going on when you process the mid side concept. So it's not just that simple. So, you use your ear kind of thing. [silence]
Exactly, it's very much a use your ear thing and obviously with the three things to keep in mind [silence] with the phasing, being able to monitor appropriately and checking things in mono so that when they collapse down to the modern listening element of single speaker sources. So strange that in modern technology, Yeah! [chuckles] [silence] we're going back to mono. Full circle, it's kind of crazy. Full circle. Yeah. [chuckles] Anyway, moving on from the concept Yeah.
of how we put this to use. And as I said, the idea that I generally use it for is on the music bus in a two bus system that goes to a master stereo bus or my ultra complicated mixed template of multiple exports going down, I have two main sources, my music bus and my vocal bus. And the vocal bus, I don't even remember [ Pause ] ever using mid-side on the vocal bus ever.
And that just has to do with things getting overly dense and suddenly there's a point where a vocal is not coming out as clear and writing it is starting to create a problem with a volume level that seems to get a little out of whack for the mix.
So instead of doing the volume ride, then it becomes an issue of doing a little bit of a mid-side effect and cutting it out, Yeah, when you're thinking of your music bus as well, I think it's fair to say that you're scooping it, making the vocals sit in there a little better and making that really fit like a glove. dealing with a broader frequency spectrum of what's going on there as well, right? Well, yeah. Where it's, if it's your vocal bus, right?
(laughs) You're not going to have any 80 Hertz down there because I've heard you sing and it's probably not going to be a whole lot of 80 Hertz, you know, but so you're dealing with No. Yeah, if I was doing a queen thing, a limited spec, so it's less use for that. I mean, I could see possibly if you're trying to add some extra width to like some massive kind of like backing vocal kind of thing as an effect. I might think about it, but then that comes more from just the panning effect Right.
and EQing the vocal for the backgrounds or maybe or whatever it is. Just want to say that that's primarily the reason why you're doing this on your music (silence) Mm-hmm. buzz and not on the vocal bus. Then again, it's like what Ruben mentioned, if somebody's now tempted to throw this on their two bus right on their master bus to start doing this once they're, they're done mixing, right? Perhaps leave (laughs)
that to the professionals, right? But that Yeah, again, it's a Yes, that's what I would think. (chuckles) dangerous tool, right? Now you're sending that off the Yeah. mastering and they go, What are we going to do with this? What's going on here? You have all these facing issues and things. So it is a really, really interesting tool, I think. Well, and it's become a lot more prevalent now Sure.
with our digital workstations, DAWs, yeah because there's a lot of plugin manufacturers now that allow you to do this. And one of our favorites, yeah at least for prior to going to Luna for mixing for me, was using the Logic EQ. yeah Because the Logic EQ had that built right in. I don't remember what version of Logic they added mid-side processing in, but it's been there for quite a while at this point. yeah, it was some 10 point something No, it was before that. that they... are you sure?
Pretty sure, because they've had linear phase EQ for a long time. Yeah, the linear phase, yeah, but I don't think it was mid-side. (Milo laughs) I think that was an advent with 10. [LAUGHTER] But anyway, we're dating ourselves now, we're going back a while anyway. (laughs) One thing to keep in mind, if any listener is a Logic user, [ Silence ] and I suspect there are a few of you, the Logic EQ, you can definitely do it in there, [ Silence ] but it would be either/or. [ Silence ]
So you'd have to instantiate two Logic EQs on the track to have one is going to deal with the mids and one is gonna deal with the sides. It's something to keep in mind, but there are some cool things that come from that. 'Cause if you have that, you could actually have a volume ride of just the mids and the sides respectively on the same channels. That's actually kind of a cool thing. Sure. I don't know if I call it a feature but it's certainly a workaround.
A little bit of a workaround that ends up being a feature, I guess, of sorts. Right. I mean, there's others as well. I mean, I'm a Slate user, the Infinity EQ does it, FabFilter Pro-Q does it, EOSIS Air does it, the full version. So that's a couple, but I have that I own, but again, I don't use it all the time. Well, the one that I use or tend to use a whole lot, So. Yeah. especially because of having moved to Luna for mixing, is Ozone and the Ozone EQ, >> Yeah.
which is very, very surgical, how it can work because it can process mid and side at the same time, just a matter of flipping the button to know what you're looking at at any given moment. And it can do some pretty amazing stuff. [ Pause ] Now to get really, really esoteric with that, and when I mentioned dealing with music bus items when it's just moments where it's going to cause issues, there's another EQ called the Dynamic EQ in Ozone,
Also an ozone. Yeah. also in Ozone, and you can use the Dynamic EQ Yeah. Yeah. in mid-side capability so that it can attack just when it's too much in a specific point in time, which is even cooler if you need that. Now, if you wanna get really, really esoteric, you just turned me onto the fact that the split EQ from Eventide can also process in mid-side widths, Yeah, per band also. whether it's the transient or the tonal portion. And that just made my mind melt. (laughs) It's ridiculous.
So yeah, so yes, as we joked, of course, you want to have like a mid side on your 800 Hertz, Yes, per band. Right. but you want the tonal qualities to be panned wide and yeah, it's nutty what that thing can do.
I would say at least my use of it, I'm probably very unlikely at this point to need that kind of depth but it is there and it's kind of crazy what we can end up with and as I like to say Sometimes it's more of a weapon than a tool, you know Very true very true In that case, it almost feels like it's weaponizing something that shouldn't be weaponized. All right.
Well, if you're a listener and I knew you are because you have to talk or listen to And with that, we're going to move on to our Friday finds. Chris, what have you got for us this week? [LAUGHTER] me talk here every Friday, but last week I said I had two and I ended up going with one Maybe I can meme it Maybe I can meme it Maybe I can meme it Maybe I can meme it Maybe I can meme it Maybe I can meme it Maybe I can meme it or this is his of the two. So this week I'm going to go for the other one.
And that is a new guitar stomp box from Boss. I'm sorry That's my My Mella Now, every guitar player knows the boss stomp boxes and I think that's at least, let's say kids from the 80s, there was nobody playing guitar that didn't have a boss pedal, right? But they have now come out with a pedal for the space echo, the Roland space echo called the RE2.
Sweet So if you're into a little bit more of experimental use perhaps and you want to go a big throwback Well, I'm sticking with your guitar pedal concept here. to Pink Floyd and soundscapes of guitars and stuff that might be a pedal for years. I thought that was pretty cool. So that is my Friday find for this week. What about you? What do you got? Is that the first time we've done that? I think it might be. I have a no, I don't, I don't know.
Really? It doesn't matter, but I thought I'd interrupt you. It's 125 episodes in and that we've done something that isn't on the same wavelength, I don't know. The idea here that I'm going with is Wampler. Probably not. Brian Wampler has now created another clone Cool. and it's not a clone clone like his Tumnus. This is a clone of the Tube Screamer, the TS-10, which means that this little pedal, and it's one of his microtype pedals, and it's like half size or something like that.
Nice. Comes with your standard tube screamer type stuff Nice. [Pause] where it's got the volume, it's got the gain, and it's got the tone knob, [Pause] but it's got two extra little switches on it. One is a voice and one is fat. So you can further dial in the type of tonality and EQ and transparency that you could possibly want out of this pedal and a TS10. It's the upgrade to the TS-10. That's what I would call it. My choice this week is the Wampler. Moxie is the name of it.
Ooh, perfect name for it. Right? Excellent, right? Yeah, yeah. Right? While we've got your attention, [ Pause ] we ask that you go to InsideTheRecordingStudio.com and sign up for our mailing list. Doing so will get you weekly reminders about the Tuesday tips when they come out and we'll make sure you don't miss any future episodes of this lovely podcast. Send us an email at goldstar@insidetherecordingstudio.com with the phrase, mid-side, and you'll get something cool back in your inbox.
If you have a topic or suggestion for Chris and I to explain in a future episode, contact us at the contact page Have a good one Jody, thanks for listening everybody. and we'll put it into consideration for a future episode. With that, I'll say, see you next week. that's a