In this free video tutorial, you will see how easy it is to monitor Mid/Side recordings live in Pro Tools without any special plug-ins.

Don't Duplicate and Invert

In my time teaching Music Technology I've seen many, many people record using an M/S array monitoring only the Mid mic and after the record pass they duplicate the Sides mic track and invert it to get stereo. I always challenged this practice as it makes it impossible to monitor in stereo at the tracking stage and anyway, it's really not that complicated to set up the bussing required for a live decode:

Bussing And Inverting

• By setting up three Auxes and using one stereo bus, is it easy to decode an M/S recording to stereo:
• Record the M mic to the left side of a stereo track
• Record the S mic to the right side of a stereo track - the positive side of the mic should be facing the left.
• Set the output of the M/S audio track to a stereo bus
• Create 3 Mono Aux tracks
• Route the left channel of the stereo bus to the first Aux (i.e. set the input of the first Aux to the left mono subpath of the stereo bus).
• Route the Right channel of the stereo bus to both the remaining Aux Tracks (i.e. set the input of the second and third Auxes to the right mono subpath of the stereo bus).
• Instantiate a trim plug-in on the third aux and invert the polarity (make sure Delay Compensation is enabled).
• Pan the first Aux centrally, the second Aux to the left and the third to the right.

Watch the free video to see this in action.