Stereo Widening?

[T-Top]

Don't know if Stereo/Widening is the right term, but how do you place instruments so they sound like they are on the outside and not in the middle of the track? Thanks!

[Cezband]

As with most things, practice makes perfect. The simplest way is just to pan different parts in varying degrees to the left or right to spread everything across the stereo field. Adding a chorus effect is a good way of widening a single sound, and some stereo delay can also be used to add width.

There is a technique used based on "the Haas Effect" which involves doubling a sound and panning hard left and right and then offsetting each by just a few fractions of a second, making your brain percieve the sounds as being from seperate sources to the right and left as opposed to a single place in the centre.

Another useful technique is to apply subtly different EQ to the high ends of the left and right channels - a stereo effect becomes more obvious when you go further up the frequency spectrum. Of course, there are also various stereo widening tools.

All of these have various pros and cons, a good wide-sounding mix usually uses any combination of the above (and probably plenty of other techniques I don't know!). Just keep familiarising yourself with the concepts and trying them out.

[T-Top]

Thanks a lot! I will try these out but could you give me the name of any Stereo Widening tools I could try out as well?

[il7mago]

I believe the "utility" effect achieves that for you.
You can put it behind every single instruments, and give it different "Panorama" values from 50R to 50L (default is C (center)).
Then you can add the same "utility" effect to the master channel, and you can use the "width" parameter to increase or decrease the overall width of the song. (that parameter will only have an effect if there is already some stereo present).

Most instruments themselves already have the parameter integrated in them. Usually called "pan". If one instruments uses several oscillators, it allows you to send each of them in a different direction. Utility's "panorama" does the same, but to the instrument's sound as a whole.

If you add a reverb or any other effect, try putting Utility before or after the reverb to see the difference for yourself.

[yur2die4]

A warning about Reverb, it sums everything up as mono for the actual 'wet' version of the effect. If your audio becomes phased out, you do not get any reverb. (unless you create a 'stereo' reverb, or use one of the stereo reverb rack presets )

[T-Top]

I don't see how Utility does this... Panorama just seems to pan it to one side or the other? Slapping on a straight utility doesn't do anything in terms of widening, I have another tool to just listen to the sides or just the mid and I still can't hear anything in the sides with utility on it

[il7mago]

Yes panorama doesn't widen the sound. But using it on different sounds with different settings can widen the song overall.

But the second parameter in Utility that I was talking about is "Width". That DOES widen your sound (as long as it's not mono).

PS: If you have a mono sound and you want to artificially widen it, chorus-type effects are what you are looking for.

[yur2die4]

A powerful use of panning, is having 'complimentary' instruments on the left and right channel. They can both be the same instruments, or different instruments playing almost similar melodies. The 'same' instrument, can even be offset by some kind of interval (seems Octave is a popular/easy one). A handy tip also is the power of keeping the level down. Try playing with left/right things combined with mono material, and tell me if you perceive any distance based on the level differences

[T-Top]

Yes panorama doesn't widen the sound. But using it on different sounds with different settings can widen the song overall.

But the second parameter in Utility that I was talking about is "Width". That DOES widen your sound (as long as it's not mono).

PS: If you have a mono sound and you want to artificially widen it, chorus-type effects are what you are looking for.

So is this just slapping on the utility and using it's default without changing anything? Because when I do this I honestly don't hear any difference at all.

[il7mago]

Yes panorama doesn't widen the sound. But using it on different sounds with different settings can widen the song overall.

But the second parameter in Utility that I was talking about is "Width". That DOES widen your sound (as long as it's not mono).

PS: If you have a mono sound and you want to artificially widen it, chorus-type effects are what you are looking for.

So is this just slapping on the utility and using it's default without changing anything? Because when I do this I honestly don't hear any difference at all.

No, what I meant to say is you have two tracks playing different instruments. On Track one, you put Utility and change the Panorama setting from "C" to 10L (left a little).
On track two, you do the same but to the right (10R).
That way you have width in your song.
Now, if you want to increase the impression of space that you already have, you could very well go back to each Utility effect in each track, and change 10L to 20L, and 10R to 20R.
But what I was trying to say is you can add a 3rd Utility effect, in the MASTER track this time, and use the "WIDTH" parameter, this time, to increase the stereo of EVERYTHING.

PS: Note that this will also have an effect on stereo samples, like drums, vocals, or anything stereo, like instruments using chorus, or unison, and also non-centred audio, like in the example.
Setting width to 200% will remove the mono material altogether.

[dentaku]

Experiment with this.

Add a Simple Delay to a track
Turn off SYNC and SYNC
Change the Time of the left channel all the way down to 1.0ms
Change the Time of the right channel down to 10ms or so

This will widen whatever is on that track.

Don't know if Stereo/Widening is the right term, but how do you place instruments so they sound like they are on the outside and not in the middle of the track? Thanks!

[il7mago]

Experiment with this.

Add a Simple Delay to a track
Turn off SYNC and SYNC
Change the Time of the left channel all the way down to 1.0ms
Change the Time of the right channel down to 10ms or so

This will widen whatever is on that track.

Don't know if Stereo/Widening is the right term, but how do you place instruments so they sound like they are on the outside and not in the middle of the track? Thanks!

That's pretty much what a chorus does. I basically simulates multiple voices from different directions.

[oddstep]

the mon/stereo (m/s) option on eq is pretty handy

[T-Top]

Yes panorama doesn't widen the sound. But using it on different sounds with different settings can widen the song overall.

But the second parameter in Utility that I was talking about is "Width". That DOES widen your sound (as long as it's not mono).

PS: If you have a mono sound and you want to artificially widen it, chorus-type effects are what you are looking for.

It doesn't widen the sound though it just fades between mono and stereo frequencies (description taken right from Ableton)

[yur2die4]

Careful with the width setting in utility. If you set it to 100% and play the resulting material on a mono system, you get Nothing, zero, zilch. . As for the Simple Delay trick, it was mentioned way at top already, and is not like a Chorus, it is the Haas effect. Chorus's modulation causes slight pitch wavering to give that unison effect