How to sound better in mono?

[hydrogen]

I'm still getting over this... I sometimes have to force myself and Pan the levels to what I know is good. Turn off the music reset my ears, leave the room and delete a preconceived notion of how it "should" or "used to" sound and then listen again. For once, I finally have some dimension in my music. Thank you Alan Blumlein for stereo.

have you tried to sum to mono after panning?
i pan it without listening than if its sound weird i sum it to mono and back for a minute or two until i realize it sounds more open and not weird.
i do this before i do any eqing/filtering.

coolness... sounds like a great way to continue working. i'll do it!

[damagedgoods]

never use panning to resolve issues with your mixdown. make sure everything fits nicely in mono and *then* worry about stereo field placement. if everything doesn't fit nicely in mono, you've still got work to do.

Is that advice for real? Im far away from being an expert but I always thought panning was key to achieve the perfect mixdown where everything sits in place and can be heard clearly.

100% for real. if you want your track to sound good in mono - which you should - then you have to sort your sounds out before you start panning them. i didn't say you shouldn't pan things; i said that panning things is a poor way to resolve clashes in the frequency spectrum.

once your sounds are in order then panning can embellish the separation, but it would be a mistake to rely on panning from the very beginning.

on a slight tangent: i hear a lot of beginner productions where everything is (IMO) really over-panned. if you're making dancefloor techno then you need to maintain a certain focal point before you worry about embellishments.

[tone-def]

where is the world do they have mono sound systems for listening to music? the Jamacian sound systems of the 60's and 70's were stereo, which is why dub music makes such good use of stereo. now 40 years later we have people on this forum claiming sound systems are in mono.

it seems like an out of date concept to me. i know mono systems are used for public annoncements but it must be very rare for music systems. maybe if the dancefloor was an "L" shape or something strange a mono system might be better. even then a 2 channel system would be better. for box/rectangle shaped rooms stereo works really well. here in london at least, dancefloors are regular shapes most of the time.

[damagedgoods]

lots of clubs have poorly thought out rigs where the speakers are close together, and if you stand far enough away from any rig it'll get pretty mono sounding too. stereo is a bit of an idealisation anyway because no realistic speaker setup apart from headphones will deliver the left channel to your left ear alone and the right channel to your right ear alone. again, nobody's saying not to make tracks in stereo, but it's good practice to make sure that anything you produce would sound ok coming from a point source.

[tone-def]

there is a difference between a badly thought out rig and a mono system. if you have a left and right channel it's a stereo system. not being able to notice stereo doesn't mean it's mono, it just means your out of the sweet spot.

[damagedgoods]

i never said "write tracks in mono" ffs.

it's true though - on a less-than-ideal rig you can't rely on stereo field to separate your mix elements because the source localisation is really poor. that doesn't necessarily mean "everything sounds like mono" but it might mean that the two snares you could clearly tell apart in your headphones now just sound like mud coming from some indiscriminate direction.