Making the most of mid/side technique
In this walkthrough, we’ve used the technique of placing the kick and snare dead centre in the mix by reducing their stereo width, and having the ride sit out on the edges of the stereo panorama by running it through a flanger. We call this kind of trickery mid/side processing, and understanding it is pretty much essential for getting contemporary-sounding drum mixes.
How does mid/side work? Usually, we think about a stereo signal in terms of left and right channels. We can ‘encode’ both channels into a mid signal (the information that’s present in both the left and right channels, and thus what you hear at the centre of the mix) and a sides signal (the difference between the left and right channels, and what you hear at the very edges of the stereo panorama). In mathematical terms, we can express this as
Mid=Left+Right, and Side=Left-Right, but a more practical way to get your head round it is to download a plugin like Voxengo’s old but still excellent freeware mid/side encoder MSED ( voxengo.com). Create an audio track in your DAW, put a piece of music that you think has a good mixdown on it, add MSED as an insert effect, and try muting the sides signal. The sound will go into mono. Then unmute the sides signal and mute the mid signal – you’ll hear that the mono signal disappears, leaving just the sides.
The advantage of dividing drum sounds between the mid and sides signals is that it gives us more headroom to work with. When we use flanging to make the ride stereo, it reduces its presence in the mid signal, making our kick and snare both sound clearer and thus allowing us to turn them up. By studying the mid/side profiles of great-sounding mixes with MSED (or other width control effects such as Live’s Utility), you can get clues as to how to use the mid/side technique in your own tracks which should help you to produce bigger and better-sounding drum tracks and mixdowns.