How to add a stereo effect to stereo linked tracks

[Ted]

Micro BR Skills Required:

• Bouncing (Owner's Manual page 50)
• Using Insert effects (Owner's Manual page 61)
• Silencing a track (either by using the level control, or switching to an empty v-track).

If you have stereo linked tracks and try to add a stereo effect, such as a pan delay or echo, you will discover that the Micro BR combines your stereo linked tracks and makes them identical--mono--before adding the effect that makes it stereo again.

Which sucks.

The way to avoid this is to bounce each of the tracks in the pair separately, and re-link them when you are done.

For example, I recorded a guitar part using a stereo chorus pedal onto tracks T34V1.

I wanted to add a stereo delay effect from the Micro BR's insert effects and bounce the results to T34V2 without losing the stereo chorus effect I already had going.

First I silenced T4.  Next bounced T3V1 to T3V2 adding the effect.

Then I silenced T3, un-silenced T4, and bounced T4V1 to T4V2 with the same effect, levels etc.

Finally I re-linked T3 and T4 at V3 (T34V2), and panned them L50 and R50 respectively.

This retained the stereo chorus effect while adding the delay I wanted.

An even more cumbersome method of doing this:

Because the stereo delay effect I used was being bounced to a single track, I lost whatever stereo properties there were to the insert effect (delay) in order to retain the stereo chorus.  A pan delay, for example, would have lost the panning properties entirely.

To preserve the stereo properties of the insert effect, I would do as above but bounce T3V1 to T12V2, and bounce T4V1 to T34V2--filling four v-tracks.  Then do a third bounce of all four tracks to T34V3.  That, I expect, would preserve a pan delay or other stereo effect that needed to be apparent.  (I haven't tried it).

Note: Before each bounce, I brought down the reverb level to 0, and then restored the reverb level to the bounced tracks.  This isn't strictly necessary, but gives you more control over the reverb levels after you've bounced.

[Glenn Mitchell]

A good addition to an unfortunately complicated process. It does work tho, and gives you more control over the final product.

[launched]

Yes, thanks for the tutorial Ted. I was recently made aware of this as well. I thought I had never fallen into the mono trap - but now that I think of it, there is a collab that I have been working on forever, and I was completely unhappy with my production skills.

It started to sound like shit, and I couldn't understand why. Effects bouncing into mono explains a lot of it. Aaaaaaaaaah!!!! Time to start smashing things!!!!!!

I'm kind of pissed now    Maybe a little embarassed, too... 

As facemask93 would say, I feel like such a pratt 

[SenhorLampada]

Good tip!
This happened to me and I used a similar method (although I didn't know at the time!)

The problem was I thought I f***ed up with my recordings!
So it is some kind of limitation (or should we say, engineering-lazy-solution)



Cheers, mateys!
And thanks again, Ted!