Stereo to FOH, but only have ONE monitor

[Rich G.]

There's been some talk of phase cancellations recently so I thought I'd start a topic on something I've wondered about for a while...

I typically run stereo to FOH, but only have one monitor. I'll route both channels to that monitor aux at FOH. This, of course, is going to sum the channels to mono... so depending on how the preset is set up I'm now subject to phase cancellations. What do you guys do when running stereo to FOH and have just a single monitor? Do you choose one channel or the other?

 

[yek]

You can also feed that monitor from one of the 1/4" OUT1 jacks on the Axe-Fx, if you only need to hear your guitar.

Or use OUT2 to send a signal (one channel) to the monitor. I made sure that my presets sound about the same when running stereo or summing to mono.

 

[barhrecords]

I put all my true stereo efx at the end of the grid. For me it's 90% stereo dly -> stereo reverb.

I monitor either L or R but not both.

I hard pan FOH L / R on two channels. If two channels are not available, I send L or R to FOH too.

 

[Zwiebelchen]

If you use heavy stereo spread or any ping-pong delays in your chain, I'd recommend putting in the extra effort to ensure mono compatibility: Just swap between stereo and summed mono output in I/O settings and see if the sound is comparable. If not, tweak settings until both stereo and summed mono sound similar. You will probably lose some of the wideness of sound, but that is the tradeoff you have to accept if you want to hear both channels through one monitor.

A different option would be to just use one channel on your monitor. You'll lose the information of the second channel then, so it's recommended not to use effects like a Ping-Pong Delay or a hardpanned harmonizer then.

I'd go for the first solution. It has the significant advantage that your presets will also work on PAs that are wired in Mono aswell.


Tbh, I mostly moved away from using artifical stereo wideners like the enhancer block, doing most of the stereo imaging with hardpanned amp/cabs and then only applying suble stereo effects that I won't mind losing or that I know won't create phase cancellation. I created a library of stereo chorus, flanger and delay blocks that create big stereo width and work in mono without a loss of information that I always go to. Saves a lot of time tweaking presets one-by-one.