I recently talked about recording vocals with two mics and mentioned the value in recording with two mics as a stereo track for simplicity in the mixing stage. This allows you to more easily keep track of takes if and when you’re comping between multiple takes or even just saving you half the time when you’re tuning up your vocal. Once you have your stereo track recorded (and edited to taste), you may find yourself wanting to isolate the different audio in each channel and put them each on their own dedicated tracks. With that in mind, let’s cover how to split stereo tracks in Ableton (though this same rough technique can be applied to any DAW).
How to Split Stereo Tracks
While your DAW may refer to this type of plugin differently, Ableton Live has a “Utility” plugin which has a number of applications for affecting the audio on the track you apply it to.
I talked about a number of these applications in my complete Ableton stock plugins overview.
The Utility plugin allows you to adjust the input or output gain of a track, adjust the panning, affect/invert the phase, and much more:
Specifically, note the “Stereo” drop down field.
By default, “Stereo” will be selected. If you click on this window, you’ll see three other choices besides Stereo: “Left”, “Right”, or “Swap” (literally just putting the left on the right and vice versa.
If we select “Left” or “Right”, we’ll exclusively hear that channel playing.
As such, if we select “Left”, we can isolate the left side of the audio on that track which is ideal when we record a stereo track with two different microphones (as in the case of recording acoustic guitar with two microphones).
Duplicate the track and simply select “Right” for the duplicate in that utility plugin and we now have the right side isolated on that track.
Just like that, we have the left and right channels essentially playing in mono as if we recorded each microphone on its own track.
As I mentioned in my overview of recording vocals with two mics, recording two sources simultaneously as a stereo track allows you to edit that combined track more efficiently than if you had to apply those edits to two tracks.
For instance, if you need to tune up a vocal or whatever the audio is in a particular section, you can simply do it on that stereo track in a single move rather than having to replicate the process on two tracks.
If you have multiple takes, using stereo tracks makes comping a vocal much easier, as well.
Once the edits are done, that’s when you can apply the Utility plugin and duplicate and split the stereo track.
If you need to adjust any phase issues, you can do it post other edits and the split, just moving one track slightly ahead or behind of the other.
Your DAW likely refers to the “Utility” track in its own way, but it’s the same principle and process, and just like that you can now split stereo tracks in your mix to isolate each channel to work with as necessary.
For what it’s worth, you can “reassemble” a stereo track after doing the above steps (duplicating the track, isolating the left and right on each) by panning that left track hard left and right track hard right then dropping the volume of both tracks by 3dB (their collective “sums” ultimately being -6dB).
If you try playing those two tracks together then A/B testing back and forth with the original unsplit track, it will sound exactly the same (assuming all other processing is the same), and is ultimately how you can recreate a stereo track from two mono tracks.
