Recording - February 2013 - 71

One, whose extensive busing capabilities are perfect for the task. I’ll leave it to you to explore how your own DAW can let you achieve this, for now just read on to get the gist behind the exercise. Let’s say you’ve created a mono guitar track like Audio Example 1. It’s not entirely bad, but it definitely could benefit from the added depth of a second mic perspective. So with the track highlighted in Studio One, press F3 to open up the mixer. Clicking on the arrow on the mixer channel opens up the insert/send panels for that channel; see Figure 1. Start by creating two new buses in the mixer. Name one bus “Mid” and the other “Side”. Add a pre-fader send to the mono track that routes to the Mid bus, and a second pre-fader send on that same track that routes to the Side bus. Studio One creates sends with reduced volume (which normally is a Very Good Thing) but in this case you’ll set the level at 0.0 for both sends. Pan the Mid send and bus hard left. Pan the Side send and bus hard right. At this point you should have one track that is split into three, the main track plus a track that has only the left side, and a track that has only the right side, as shown in Figure 1. The channel on the left, labeled in blue, is the original audio track; the channels labeled in yellow on the right are the buses. Create another bus and name it “M/S” as shown in Figure 2. With this bus in place, change the previously created Mid and Side buses so they output to this new M/S bus. If this all seems a little strange—to split the audio into left and right, and then recombine everything back into a single channel?—that’s a good indication that you’re doing it correctly. Once you have the left and right tracks separated you can treat each as a separate sound source and adjust them as if they were two mics, encode them as if they were a M/S recording, and you’re there. Additional sends could be used for more complex applications.

Fig. 2

Fig. 3a

What you’re after The problem at the moment, however, is that your mono track is sending exactly the same sound to your split Mid and Side buses. To simulate multiple mics—in this case a M/S recording—you need to adjust the Side bus to sound different than the Mid bus. (Notice how we’re showing slots for effects for the Side but not the Mid bus in Figure 1? That’s a hint...) With a true M/S recording, the Mid mic captures the direct sound and the Side mic captures predominantly the reflected sound. Depending on the recording space, the reflected sound can differ from the direct sound in one or more of the following ways: ~ Reflected sound arrives at the mics later than the direct sound. ~ High and low frequencies can be attenuated on the reflected sound depending on the surface area in the recorded space. ~ Direct sound has more of the original sound source, where reflected sound has more characteristics of the physical space. All of these can be simulated on the Side bus using insert effects. Using any suitable tool you have available (in this demonstration it’s the free Voxengo Audio Delay plugin shown in figure 3a), the Side bus can be delayed, from a couple of milliseconds to something absolutely ridiculous. Your DAW’s eq (in this case it is the Pro EQ in Studio One, see Figure 3b) can easily roll off some of the edges. You could even use a reverb to add further reflection character to the Side bus. Decoding the fake M/S To complete the illusion, insert a M/S decoder into the combined M/S bus. In Figure 2 we can see the Studio One MixTool plug-in in place; in Figure 4 you can see how we’ve selected “MS Transform” from among the various utility functions that MixTool offers.
RECORDING February 2013

Recording - February 2013

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