What do you guys do for stereo widening? Do you use it on the master bus, only on certain instruments, or just leave it up to mastering engineer? What plugins do you use? A lot of the mixes I've heard on here, as well as professional mixes, all sound much wider than mine. I've tried the AIR stereo width plugin that comes with PT M Powered, and Ozone on the master bus, and I'm still not getting the width that I'm hearing on other mixes, plus it tends to make the highs sound more harsh.
Stereo Width
- Thread starter KKuff
- Start date
I normally leave it for mastering, but may put it on guitars and use something like doubler on vocals to give it more width. Panning, eq, reverb and delays can help with a wider image. For example use reverb to place something further back in the mix, this makes the tracks panned full left and right sound even wider.
width can be very dependent on frequency.......low end is more omnidirectional....high end is more directional....watch how much low, low mids are in your mixes.....hi pass filtering can also help....and the pan laws in protools are messed up......so you should probably pay attention to that.....also i find mixing in mono while panning is great as well...pan things like you normally would then listen in mono things panned hard are going to be too soft turn it up this may sound weird at first but it works.
Stereo wideners are not the solution for wide mixes.....and I hate it when they do it in mastering....it messes up my kick snare bass and vocal levels.
Stereo wideners are not the solution for wide mixes.....and I hate it when they do it in mastering....it messes up my kick snare bass and vocal levels.
Ermz
¯\(°_o)/¯
I only use it as an effect or for salvaging sources that should've been recorded in stereo. This is not a workhorse effect, so you should not treat it as such. On good playback systems it will just sound WEIRD.
However, one of my favourite uses for it is on mono delays (let's say main vocals) automated on big passages to really OPEN up in the stereo field rather than just the middle.
However, one of my favourite uses for it is on mono delays (let's say main vocals) automated on big passages to really OPEN up in the stereo field rather than just the middle.
Hey Matt, thanks for the info. The last mix I was working on is pretty heavy in the low mid area, so I'm sure that has something to do with it. I don't really know anything about the pan laws in Pro Tools, I just assumed it was -3db like most other DAWs that I'm familiar with, I'll do more research about that. Thanks for the tip about mixing in mono while panning, usually I do most of my mixing in mono first then start panning, I'll definitely try it out this way.
Another thing that I realized after I posted the original thread, was that the mix I was working on at the time only had dual tracked guitars, so I compared it to some of my older mixes that I used quad tracking, and it (quadtracking) definitely sounded much wider. Up until now I just thought that it made it more full sounding, didn't realize it affected the width so much.
Moonlight_Seeker
Member
I'm not sure if I dreamed of it, but I once read that a big Finnish sound engineer which I won't name because of that dreaming part, well I once read that he uses a hardware imager on every instrument. And I personally think that when you do that you don't need to put it on the master bus. And to what extent you want to use individual imagers like that, I would say it depends on the music you are mixing. If there are only guitars, bass, drums and vocals, then I guess you don't have to abuse of it so very much. Dunno! 
But after I read/dreamed of this, I tried it on a mix that made me bang my head on the walls because there were 4 vocal different vox, double tracked guitars, bass, drums and around 10 different simultaneous synth parts. Nothing was working and it always felt like a big mozza ball or something, so I abused of the imagers in individual tracks and the mozza ball was transformed into ... well something much clearer. I used imagers and surround tools.
And at the end with the mastering tools maybe re-image it a bit. But once you get there you might even want to image it smaller. My philosophy on such FX is a bit like compressors, in the sense that I much prefer to put 2 mild compressors then 1 "intense".
But after I read/dreamed of this, I tried it on a mix that made me bang my head on the walls because there were 4 vocal different vox, double tracked guitars, bass, drums and around 10 different simultaneous synth parts. Nothing was working and it always felt like a big mozza ball or something, so I abused of the imagers in individual tracks and the mozza ball was transformed into ... well something much clearer. I used imagers and surround tools.
And at the end with the mastering tools maybe re-image it a bit. But once you get there you might even want to image it smaller. My philosophy on such FX is a bit like compressors, in the sense that I much prefer to put 2 mild compressors then 1 "intense".
