If I have an analog synth that has stereo out but don’t use the FX or things like voice/stereo spread, would I miss anything if I just used L or R output? Same question for recording dry, unpanned DN or ST tracks? This would make cabling easier, but I‘m not sure I‘m missing something, like synths introducing slight variations between L/R signals without any modulation telling them to do so.
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If you’re not using any effects or “fancy” stuff like pan-able oscillators, you won’t be missing anything AFAIK
Plenty of my analogue mono’s have only a single output
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No, I don’t think you’d miss anything, left is usually the correct output for mono.
In fact, you’d probably end up with better mixes since it’s easier to place the sounds in the stereo field later and you need to be more careful with the frequencies.
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Great. thanks! If I plugged a mono cable into the stereo headphone output, I guess I‘d loose something? Always better to use the left output?
You can get proper stereo to mono summing cables
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In that case I think you might get a 50% volume drop as most gear isn’t expecting a mono cable in a headphone jack
If the synth has two L & R output jacks, using the left will be treated as mono (if nothing in in the R jack), but that’s going to depend on the device
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Nothing at all. Its a con.
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A lie spun by Big Cable to make you buy more bits of wire
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I suppose a feature of using only one channel is you could then use a pan or spread as an extra vco modulation source.
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on elektrons you can’t have a proper pre-fader wet/dry for the fx, you can only send the track to the fx and/or mute it from the main outs, however, at the time @pokk came up with a pretty neat idea of using only one mono out and using pan as a pre-fader, so imagine using only one channel as mono channel, let’s say the the left out, and then you can pan items all the way to the right which will be muted from playing in the left channel, but if you send them to the fx they still will come out, right? and when you start blending the pan to the left you add the dry signal to the mix. so that’s a very neat trick to have a way better control over the wet/dry fx using only one mono out. you can do interesting stuff with this technique that can be in mono, you can do heavy reverb usage but have it in mono and properly control the pre-fader send to it, so better blending of wet/dry signal, and not pollute the stereo image, or you can add nice bouncing of the delay, now with delay things get more interesting because if you use the ping pong delay, that means that the pings that go to the right channel will be lower in volume, so you can create interesting patterns of the delays using the different volume of the pings.
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Ah, that’s really interesting and useful.
I was only thinking the other day that a cool update would be for the fx sends on Elektron gear to actually fade the dry signal out to fully wet. Switchable per track.
Don’t know if it’s actually possible. I’m sure it’s an ancient wish though
pretty sure it’s impossible for the rytm/a4 and probably the og digis but maybe for the new get ones. I don’t think elektron wants to go that way though, I mean, on the analogs you do have individual outs so they are primed to work with a mixer and external fx, it is a very cool technique though for sound design or if you use more than one device you can keep one in pure mono with neat pre-fader fx and the other one for stereo duties.
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No, if you plug in a mono (TS) cable, you will only get the left channel because that’s what is send to the tip of the cable. When you use a stereo (TRS) cable, the left channel will be at the tip and the right channel on the ring. The sleeve is always ground.
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