A question about mixing?

[Georgia_Boi]

When i bounce my midi tracks to audio, what should be mono and what shall be stereo? I also read on the net that you shouldn't pan stereo tracks (not sure if that is true or not). How do you guys go about arrangement and mixing?

 

[Adrian-MarQ]

When bouncing a track I leave off all effects that aren't part of the original sound or aren't essential to the sound (usually reverb, delay, etc). If a sound that I'm using started off in stereo (didn't use a plugin to stereoize it) then I will leave it in stereo. The only time I personally sum something to mono before bouncing it is if I'm 100% certain that it will be mono in the mix (usually kicks, bass, snare, etc). I usually stick to doing it this way because it could be difficult to recreate the stereo image of a file that was rendered in mono.

You can pan a stereo track, but that might alter how its stereo image sounds.

 

[steffeeh]

It's not that you shouldn't pan stereo sounds, it's that you should sum stereo sounds sounds to mono before panning them.
The reason it's being said that you shouldn't use stereo when panning is because it partly destroys one of the reasons we pan.
Sure we pan to give the track a certain feeling, but we also pan many times just to separate sounds from eachother so they don't collide that much, and if it's a stereo sound, it will still collide with the other sound.
So before panning it's recommended to sum the sound to mono to be sure that the sound is "in its place".
Though sometimes it actually sounds better by not summing it to mono, in the end it's all about what sounds good.

 

[bandcoach]

the problem is that a stereo sound is already panned to be somewhere in the stereo spectrum
- summing to mono is a destructive process that will cause destructive interference if the sound is not already panned centre within its own stereo spectrum
-even with the above caveat, if the sound source then has stereo effects added, like reverbs or delays, summing these to mono will cause further destructive interference

so from the above two points we get the following rules of thumb

1) remove any stereo fx from mono or stereo tracks before bouncing down to audio
2) before removing the MIDI data tracks, copy their fx patches to the new audio tracks
3) stereo sound sources should be kept stereo when bouncing down to audio
4) mono sources can be bounced to mono audio

in addition panning a stereo track is down to individual taste - if it works, do it; if it doesn't, re-pan to the centre