Why keep chopped breaks in stereo?

Does anyone have any good reason to keep chopped breakbeat samples in stereo or is it generally better to always convert breaks to mono before chopping them into individual drum hits?

Whatever works for you musically, there are no rules!

Keep them in stereo, and in the track DSP you can instead use a Stereo Expander set to MONO. That way you can adjust how much or little stereo you want, without altering the source files.

It also depends on how the original break was mixed. Obviously, if the stereo means room, it can work. If the stereo means hihats hard right snare hard left, it might be problematic.

interesting, thanks. I would never have thought of using stereo expander set to mono.

So to get the mono sum of left and right channels I would put the ‘expand’ slider all the way to the left (mono), ‘surround’ slider all the way to the right (100%), and ‘mono mix’ to L+R?

I tried it with ‘surround’ at the lowest, but I got almost silence. Now I’m not sure if what I am hearing is mono or not.

So to get the mono sum of left and right channels I would put the ‘expand’ slider all the way to the left (mono), ‘surround’ slider all the way to the right (100%), and ‘mono mix’ to L+R?

I tried it with ‘surround’ at the lowest, but I got almost silence. Now I’m not sure if what I am hearing is mono or not.

leave surround alone,to sum left and right use mono mix l+r.Word of warning though sometimes summing left and right together can alter the overall sound in odd ways so i tend to use only one channel when mixing down to mono,of course if you want to keep different aspects of left and right channel you must use l+r

Now it really depends on the break, as we work with it we work with the character it brings with it, and that can be very different.

For example I’m just at the scorpio break, and decided to only use the left channel and discard the right completely. It is a very panoramic mixed break, so l and r very different. The right side is just drowned in a thick ass essy hihat and lots of mushy ambience of the kick, while using only the left side yields a crazy clean punchy breakbeat with a real nice snappy tight hihat that is not too strong. Mixing both together lead to a totally different sound, much harder to control and muddier. And I remember other breaks that would benefit in clarity or variation from using only one of the stereo sides.

With the stereo expander you would only get a 50/50 mix of both sides. I edit, slice and chop and such the sample anyways, so it doesn’t hurt to hit the “adjust” button in the sample editor and selecting “mono - keep L” at some point of the work & be happy from then on. You could also play with panning the break before the stereo expander to control the weight of the mixdown.

Using full stereo you will have to make your mix around the original mix of the break, which was done in a totally different time and context. The scorpio break for example would suck with its hard panned action. Maybe with some breaks it could make sense to narrow them, but not totally to mono but leave some percents of stereo in. Just to make them a bit more sparkling and interesting in sound.

Awesome. Thanks for the excellent words of advice here. Much appreciated