Stereo sampling
Although stereo samplers have been around for decades, hardware sampler users back in the day mostly chose to work with mono sounds. Adding extra memory was an expensive upgrade to an already pricey sampler, so mono sampling was an efficient way to way to claw back 50% more memory per sample. Today, of course, being economical with your computer’s storage is a thing of the past, but even in modern virtual sampler instruments, there’s still merit in converting stereo sounds to mono, particularly when lifting samples from records containing hard-panned elements.
So, slap a mono plugin on your sample and it’s good to go, right? Well, not always. Summing a stereo signal to mono can result in some phase cancellation, leaving you with a weaker-sounding version of your stereo sample. Instead, it’s usually better to pick one side of the audio and work with that. By splitting a stereo sample into its individual left and right channels, we can choose the most appropriate side for the job in hand.
Take the break from The Winstons’ Amen Brother as an example: if you split the break down to its left and right channels, you’ll notice that one channel sounds brighter and more ‘dense’ than the other, making it the preferred choice for sampling. Picking one side of a stereo sample also makes it easy to isolate hard-panned instruments – for instance, a guitar riff sitting over to the far left side of a mix can be isolated and stolen with ease.