[Anderton]

Originally Posted by rick-slo

Interesting. In many cases when you have another sound source besides the guitar (in this case guitar and synthetic harpsichord) much of the reason for stereo mic'ing a solo guitar goes out the door.

Agreed but FYI the harpsichord was the real thing, so your point is actually more relevant.

I do think the warmer, rounder, notes of a classical guitar comes across a better mono than a flattop which gets more thin sounding.

Also agreed most of the time, but maybe not for the same reason. The classical guitar is more delicate and kind of needs all the help it can get. Acoustic with steel strings is pretty brash, and it can take over a mix if you're not careful. I tend to cut steel string a bit in the 500Hz - 1kHz range if there's a singer involved. I've tried the one-mic technique with steel string, but with mixed results. Whether it works or not depends mostly on where the guitar needs to sit in the final mix.

Regarding phasing in stereo, that is a serious issue when you pan towards the middle instead of panning full (or nearly full) right and left. However at full right and left panning I do find some channel delay (right or left), when listening through headphones anyway, may change the sound in a positive direction (in addition of course to an alteration of perceived location in space).

That's actually becoming a real issue for me when mastering. I used to master on speakers and use headphones as a reality check but with so many people listening to music on headphones, now it's the other way around. I still check for mono compatibility/phase integrity, maybe out of force of habit...once in the air, that stereo become more mono. But I really don't know if it matters that much any more.

I still always start a mix in mono, because that helps make it obvious which instrument frequency ranges are stepping on each other. So when it does open up to stereo, it ends up being quite dramatic...but I have to be careful that it's not too dramatic with headphones.