Is Phase Cancellation RUINING your music? 

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One easy way to introduce phase cancellation is getting a fuller vocal track sound by duplicating it and moving the duplicate a little bit relative to the original. This can work but for some gap lengths between the two one can get serious phase cancellation. Apparently The Beatles used this technique on some of their recordings.

Thanks Colin for this instructive and very useful information. My friend musician records and mixes music in Logic Pro for my songs and I do the 'mastering' of the song in GarageBand using the free Masterdesk Classic plugin. We had no problem with this workflow in earlier projects but faced this problem in our current project: the master sounded good on all devices but, when uploaded to RU-vid, the volume became lower only when heard on mobile speakers! Wondering whether this had to do with the RU-vid's processing, I tried out making different versions of the project at different LUFS, but despite all the efforts, the problem persisted. After googling about the various causes for this serious issue, I thought the culprit could be due to mixing in stereo and had my friend mix in mono [he was earlier on mixing in stereo]. Despite this change, the problem still persisted. Finally, I suspected the stereo widening plugin of the Masterdesk was the culprit, and you too confirmed that phase cancellation could be the cause, when I exported a master with 0 stereo width, the problem went away. Colin, without your excellent teachings, it would have been impossible for novices like me and my friend to bring out fairly good sounding music. Thanks friend.

As a old drummer new to recording, 1st I have to say, i think you do a great job explaining every topic I've heard you touch on. Anyways, I'm using a room mic, along with 2 OH's, K, and snare for now. Because the room mic isn't an equal distance, could that cause phase issues? Thanks

Didn’t know this about stereo spread plugins. Thanks, Colin! 👍🏻

I'm pretty sure that in the past couple of projects that I've worked on I have unwittingly added phase cancellation in with the stereo spreader. I had previously done it by doubling vocals and offsetting them by a 30 - 40 ms. This is really helpful! Now Know what to go back and look at when I get that thin mix. Can you introduce phase cancelation using multiple reverbs?

Thanks for the info, Colin, especially about how Stereo Spreaders can add phase cancellation. Does the Stereo Enhance feature in the bx_masterdesk Classic plugin cause any of these phase issues as well?

Hey Colin do you know if there’s an compatible plugin for GarageBand that could use mid side eq processing .. im trying to get my vocals to cut thru a 2 track beat without competing frequencies. or its not possible on GB ?

Because of information overload I have not dealt with this situation. But now I am going to record drums with 4 mikes and I might see this as a problem. That might be a cool video for you to do.....hint....ps thanks