Are you missing something when sampling, ripping, editing those samples, loops, breaks? Maybe....
If the original recording is stereo, there may be a gold mine of sound data that you may be able to further customize your sounds. Most commercial samples of classic drum sounds or breaks or what-have-you merely merge stereo-> mono and sell 'em to you. But if you get into original recordings or good quality WAV samples of Stereo content, listen to them carefully.
How is the sample or loop recorded? how is the drum break recorded? When you go back into the 60's and 70's where most of the "good stuff" is, many recordings were done "live" where everybody is mashed together in a room. Multiple mics will pick up sonic characters from other instruments or drums in the room, thus creating the unique stereophonic character non-existant in today's studio session (or live) recordings.
Old recordings featured alot of natural room reverberation (echos and reflections off walls and floors etc...) especially with drums. Even better is if there were two or more mics positioned on or over the drums (especially overheads -- X/Y or any kind of Spread) Each mic will pick up its sound in its own unique way depending on the location and angle of the sound source (like drum heads or cymbals)
To make it simple, find one of your loops or breaks (stereo of course) and load it up in whatever stereo editor you have. Mute each channel and listen to what it sounds like. You will find that sound from each channel has a unique tone, perhaps one you may really like to use. this can breathe new life into an old classic or even worn-out break (Amen anyone?) I've done this trick with a few old breaks and really liking some of the new character and punch I get out of it.
You can get even crazier and invert-phase one of the channels-- which cancels out any center audio data and get some room noise (result of this will be mono, but since this is Caustic PCMSynth only plays mono)
I'm applying this theory to a nice bright clean piano PCMSynth preset I will bring to the Forum free in the next week or so. I like a lush stereo piano sound, but for what Caustic is designed to do and for alot of pop-styles of music, mono piano punches thru the mix much better anyway.
If any of this gibberish made sense, hopefully inspires you to dive deeper into your sample library and find some hidden gems that you may suprise us with later when we listen to your tracks.
Cheers! J
I remember this being a major complaint amongst jazz musicians (also not being able to see and interact with eachother during recording).
Thanks for the informative information :)
By the way did you know stereo drums can sound harsh to the speakers, and mostly all sub woofers can not tackle the stereo effect on ca. 50hz below, so I'm advising everyone to not work to much on stereo since it's kinda too much for the speakers. Most limiters in programs have merging of stereo at 200hz below.
Also I know a guy who told me that stereo bass can get the pin of turntables out of position :)
If you would like to have stereo kicks operating in different speciality all you need to do is to invert left channel and leave the right channel as original when working on mono kick.