Stereo Spreeeaaaaad . . . .

[ChiDJ]

I' ve been using Ozone's enhancer quite a bit lately. It can be harsh, but I correct that with some EQ before and after Ozone.

Waves doubler can also be useful, but not as intuitive as OZone.

T-

I was never 100% sure but I had guessed it was the enhancer. What kind of eq corrections do you do? BTW where do you apply the enhancer (on individual channels or on the master) ?

I use it on leads and sometime Background vocals. The plug is quite user friendly with four frequency zones to tweak. Depending on the material, I will widen low mids, mids, or hi's. (I always keep the lows narrow).

I, personally, would never use it in the master buss.

T-

[amigo]

Check out Stereoizer from NuGen Audio.

http://stereoizer.software.informer.com/

[cbentley]

I haven't really heard a plug in that makes things sound naturally wide without phasing or artifacts. You can usually get by with just a touch or play with the mid/side settings a bit before it starts sounding un-natural. My favorite technique is to either double track the sound(synth/guitar/whatever) and pan them each to opposite sides (I think it's been mentioned already). It should also be noted that sometimes nailing the right eq can help things sound wider with the respect that sometimes too much mid and upper mid can make something sound smaller and more upfront than it should be.

Another trick worth trying is pan your sounds just inside hard left and right and feed them to a qucik reverb/delay/etc, with the return at hard left/right and a touch or a stereo widening effect on the return. Wideneing effects on fx returns are somtimes a little less obvious if the song is played back in mono. You can always do the classic harmonizing trick by pitch shifting a mono center signal by several cents and pan the results to opposite sides. As with anything... use your own ears to decide what's right you.

[stonee]

these methods are probably less than ideal, but have always worked for me, but would depend on the type of music you do. I do thick psy type stuff, so it works well for me.

there's a couple of effects in ableton that widen really well.

-for drums, pan the hats to either side.

-throw on a utilty, and invert the phase on one channel. it widens it to one side, but is still a cool effect. also can help seperate instruments.

-subtle reverb with the stereo knob cranked up.

-vinyl distort has a really nice wide sound, but, you cant distort many instruments.

- subtle ping pong delay. i probably abuse this one, but its an effect i like. ping pong with a short feedback and d/w around 20-30%.

-spin on alot of the effects makes a really nice effect.

-panning instruments gently, or a subtle auto pan.

-and effect that will output a stereo effect will widen it up.

[intellijel]

How can you use M/S to create stereo widening if the source is mono?

In this situation there would be no S component to eq.

[nebulae]

I use Nitro's stereo spreader - does the trick really well, and Nitro is only $10 from Audiomidi.com.

[intellijel]

I use Nitro's stereo spreader - does the trick really well, and Nitro is only $10 from Audiomidi.com.

Isn't PSP nitro a filter? You must mean the PSP stereo pack.

[nebulae]

I use Nitro's stereo spreader - does the trick really well, and Nitro is only $10 from Audiomidi.com.

Isn't PSP nitro a filter? You must mean the PSP stereo pack.

Nitro has a bunch of operators. Some are filters, there's a saturator, and there's a stereo spread.

[alex.the.forge]

eq8 mid/side mode...

+1

also, Robert Henke made a really cool post once about getting more out of Live's reverb by putting 2 in parallel and using utility to pan them left/right then following it with mid/side EQ8

[longjohns]

.. which I named Robert Reverb Rack, on my computer

hehe

[GrooveNinja]

I have been using CMX from Schwa (www.stillwell.com) to stereo-ize mono tracks. It really does a very nice job. I'll second Nitro, too.