Been banging my head against this for a while and I’m curious how people doing PE / death industrial / dark ambient actually handle this stuff ITB.
Every time I get those huge distorted reverbs and delays sounding good in stereo, they lose a ton of impact in mono. Not completely, but enough to annoy me.
What confuses me is that a lot of references in these genres seem super wide and messy in a good way:
low correlation, smeared stereo image, distorted reverb tails everywhere, overlapping layers fighting each other, sometimes even stereo low end
…but they still feel massive and don’t totally disappear collapsed to mono.
I’m working in Ableton and lately I’ve been trying stuff like:
- mono distorted core + huge stereo layers
- parallel mono/stereo amp chains
- distorting the reverbs themselves
- bitcrushing before amp sims
- filtering some top end after distortion
- sending multiple sounds into the same destroyed bus
Sometimes it gets close, but other times the stereo version sounds incredible while the mono version turns weak...
So I guess I’m trying to understand what people are actually doing in practice.
Are you:
keeping some hidden mono backbone underneath everything?
using different distortion chains for center/sides?
relying more on panning than stereo decorrelation?
distorting grouped buses instead of individual sounds?
Also curious about filtering. A lot of mixing advice says to aggressively separate layers, but many PE/death industrial records sound like several full-range signals being smashed together at once.
Would love to hear how people approach this, especially if you work mostly or entirely in the box.