It’s easy to do this with effects, but don’t underrate the power of multitracking your instruments here. Similar enough that it’s still clearly the same instrument, but different enough to disrupt the ‘mono’ effect of having the exact same sound in both ears. The answer is simple – make the copied track different. So you duplicate the recording and hard pan each one, but even then, you’re just sending the exact same signal to both speakers. Panning a single mono recording isn’t going to sound that wide. Little touches like putting your snare slightly to the left, or automating the pan on a buildup can have a subtle but important impact on the perceived width of your track. Panning, in my honest opinion, is still probably one of the best ways to make things wider.ĭon’t underestimate the importance of simple panning decisions. With these techniques, you’ll learn about how our brain perceives width, and how we can play with this information to create more luscious and spacious mixes. In this article, we’re going to look at four tried-and-true approaches to enhancing and controlling the stereo width of your tracks. Any plugin with a ‘one-knob’ solution for controlling width will be a broad strokes approach that works until it doesn’t. The issue with most stereo imager/enhancement plug-ins is that they are not tuned for your track.
While these can be very handy, they don’t give you precise control over the stereo image. Simply put, most people have two ears, so why not take advantage of this with stereo effects?įor many, a simple ‘one size fits all’ stereo enhancer plugin is enough. This makes sense for club tracks that might be heard over a mono system, though this is becoming less common, and the stereo image of your track still affects the mono mixdown – usually for the worse. When it comes to mixing, the stereo image of a track often takes a backseat to EQ, compression, and volume.
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