I have been tracking alot of rock bands lately. The questioin I have is..
How do you make sense of mulitple mono guitars? Say you have 2 guitar parts. What I usually do is have the player track the same part twice (double the existing), vwala creating a "stereo guitar". But were do you feel the guitars sit nicely? I have been told to pan one guitar track left the other right. Then the second guitar track left the other right. So now you have them sitting near or on top of each other. With all the other insturments, it gets messy, so next step is to do some EQing.
Overall my wondering is, what is a concept to start off with or follow to get mulitiple mono tracks to make sense in the mix?

What you have described is not stereo , but multiple mono.

quote:

...What I usually do is have the player track the same part twice (double the existing), vwala creating a "stereo guitar". But were do you feel the guitars sit nicely? I have been told to pan one guitar track left the other right. Then the second guitar track left the other right.

Does this make sense?
It sounds like you are recording the 2 guitars as stereo (or actually dual mono) and pan them both into each other...
If I record a guitar twice I usually record them in mono and pan them away from each other (the first to the left, the second to the right).
If I only record 1 guitar I found that putting instead of letting the output signal go to the master channel I actually turn down the volume and insert 2 bus channels (mono output panned left and right - again AWAY from each other) with some different effects - sometimes like the Fender Twin amplifier on the first bus and then the Marshall JCM900 on the second bus ( these are free from SimulAnalog and are called Guitar suite - http://www.simulanalog.org/guitarsuite.htm )
Sometimes I just throw in a chorus on the first channel and nothing on the other - sometimes a Univibe on the other, somtimes just a delay, somtimes an impulse response, sometimes... well use your imagination - it all depends on the song and the expression of the sound though..

Hope this helps!
Dennis P

Alternatives:
Starting with 2 files - a single mono gtr1 and a single mono gtr2.
1. Copy each file to a new track so you now have 2 gtr1 and 2 gtr2 tracks.
2. Pan gtr1 trk1 hard left and gtr1 trk2 to 15% right of center.
3. Pan gtr 2 trk1 hard right and gtr2 trk2 10% left of center.
4. Now create pseudo-stereo by delaying or advancing 1 trk of each pair by 10 to 30 msec or by adding some time-altering effect (ex. flange)