Hello there,
I ocationally do techno/house gigs with Octa as a main unit without a mixer. Main outs to the venue audio facilities.
I want to make kicks and bases mono, so they don’t give the stereo rumble. Is there a way to do it without going to studio mode, taking a mixer and routing everything to individual outputs.
You can make a track mono with Spatializer fx.
Fx setup page > M/S = 1, MG = max, SG = 0
I guess you don’t talk about CUE STUDIO MODE, which doesn’t change stereo behavior.
Oh! thank you for remiding me about Spatializer. Maybe you have idea of the same solution for Analogue for.
There is a workaround with STUDIO CUE MODE where you reduce all the levels (ABCD) but one. That way you can have 4 separate mono outs.
Which levels?
There is LEVEL and CUE LEVEL, stereo, and with 1 balance for both. That way you can have individual out, if you hard pan left or right, setting LEVEL or CUE LEVEL to 0.
I don’t know where your ABCD trick come from, I don’t think it works but I would be interested in if so! 
(for individual CUE OUT and stereo main).
In Studio Mode, the main difference is that CUE LEVEL is displayed, and that MAIN and CUE mutes are linked.
There is LEVEL and CUE LEVEL, stereo, and with 1 balance for both. That way you can have individual out, if you hard pan left or right.
So this is the trick, i’ve mentioned.
Ok, no luck, ABCD levels would have been something interesting and new…
You can have individual outputs without STUDIO MODE.
For A4 you’d want mono settings for main out too? The only solution I see is to check parameters concerning pan. Ask in the appropriate topic maybe…
I’m not sure I understand the original question. Mono is either coming out of a single channel to a single speaker, or not panned left or right in a stereo mix and going to stereo speakers. Right?
So wouldn’t a mono sample* remain mono unless you start to process it with reverb / delay / panning etc.?
If so, then don’t Process with stereo effects your bass will remain mono. Of course if your Bass has a stereo image then yes, the Spatializer can fix that. You could always resample the bass if you want to free up that FX slot again.
I’m happy to be enlightened about mono though, it’s not a situation I’ve had to deal with (outside of mono-izing all low frequencies in a mastered track for vinyl).
EX/
*I know the OT always records in stereo even though you can sample in mono.
You can use the audio editor, it will only apply for the current session unless you save the sample…
Thanks for that tip. I didn’t realize this wasn’t persistent. It could be the key to one of my projects.
Cheers,
C
I became aware of the problem when I discovered that OT master outputs mix had a lot of kick and base information in the Side part of the image. Even though the samples were mono with OT Eq and compressor.
Were all samples in the mix mono? Because it may also be some weird interference effect which just looks like it comes directly and only from kick and bass while it isn’t.
I understand your concern, as a sound engineer I avoid stereo imaging of bass-heavy sources. We use crossover filters for this. When mixing live, we use separate submixes for bassbins and tops/fills.
But I don’t understand what you mean by “bass information in the side part of the image”. That would make sense if you use 3 channels. But you don’t, do you? Are you telling us you try to use the OT as a crossover filter? There’s no way to have a lowpass on the cue outs, so you’re stuck with your stereo outs anyway. unless you use an external mixer to separate the frequencies and emulate a proper mono bass channel but from a technical point of view you will run into all sorts of phase issues around the cutoff frequency, because mixer EQ’s are really not designed for this task.
This is rather a job for the house engineer to set up his system properly.
I guess I may have misused mid/side concept.
Anyway, what I am referring to is that when I put my track, recorded out of octatrack stereo out, into Voxengo MSED then mute the mid part, I still hear lots of kick bass on the side part.
Never heard of crossover filters, will do my research.
House engendeers typically don’t exist in dance club format. I play in between regular DJs who have their tracks commercially mastered. So there is a need to keep up with the sound quality
Ah, you didn’t mention that in your OP, leaving us guessing. Please give ALL the details, so we don’t waste our time writing senseless posts
The reasons can be multiple, the S channel being L-R this can be prior processing or post-processing in the OT. Or simple a slight panning will add LF content to the Side. Anyway, the idea of “monophonizing” bass content in a stereo recording is to filter that out of the S channel at let’s say 700hz @12dB/octave then re-encode M/S to stereo. If you do that, how does its sound?
EDIT: I feel that you’re making things much more difficult than they are. Why would you use M/S technique on individual samples to monophonize them? Did you plan to do the whole process in real-time on the OT stereo outputs? ? Never heard of this before…
I guess I was unclear many times. My bad.
Thanks for your patience.
Basically I need to be sure that OT stereo out doesn’t produce bass on the S channel. That is it.
I guess i need to do some testing with live M/S monitoring. May be it is some master-track effect causing the rumble.
But, the PA system is usually stereo. I’m not in the techno-rave community, maybe there are innovative techniques being employed there but I never heard of M/S encoding a live stream to avoid “rumble”.
Nor do I anayse what you mean by “rumble” exactly, I must admit. I can identify phase issues when I hear them (that’s part of my daytime job), I have handled many a “rumble” issue when using turntables live on high-power PA’s, (or rattling furniture and breathing walls and ceilings) but “rumble” coming straight out of the OT (or otherwise pure electronic devices) is a discovery. Unless you simply have more LF content than the house PA can handle, or content including high power frequencies below the system’s specs which leads to a frequency-modulation effect in the low-mid and bass parts which basically is a LFO on the bass frequencies. The speaker cone is then moving slowly (like 10 HZ) at maximum excursion, and the “normal” bass frequencies (50HZ to 120Hz) are modulated by this oscillation because they are carried physically by the same speaker. The more elastic the cone suspension the more dramatic the result.
Maybe just cut off LF under 30 HZ would solve a big part of the issue. The DJ-style EQ on the master track is a quick problem solver in this context.
And you should forget about competing live with professionnally mixed and mastered content. The OT is one hell of a box, but it can’t do everything on it’s own.