Where's the wideness coming from?

[TonyCrazyMan]

All professionally made CDs have one thing in common:

Pristine wideness

 

Besides the pristine wideness they also have soft smooth thin clear treble. You can hear it on the cymbals. And they also have warm smooth bass. Wonderful!

 

But where is it coming from? What are the main tools used to achieve such a beautifully wide sound picture? Is it a product they all use or is it in the mixing technique? Or both?

 

How do I get closer to THAT?!

 

Please listen:

 

Vince Gill Clean Fresh sound. Beautiful!

[TonyCrazyMan]

Is it a combination of good panning techniques and great reverb?

In that case, how do you do it and what reverb should be used?

[Kiwiburger]

Obviously every link in the chain is important. You are looking at the sum product of a well tracked, mixed and mastered album. Probably many different people were involved - it's a huge subject that is best broken down into manageable pieces.

 

Focusing on Widness ... i'll throw in a concept that I think is worth considering. Haas effect panning.

 

Most of us are familiar with Pan Pot panning. With this simple method, the voltage is panned left or right. Extreme Left is where there is 100% signal to the left speaker, and 0% to the right. You can't get any more Left than that. Or can you?

 

Actually, you can fool you brain into perceiving sounds beyond your Left speaker. This can be done by using small delays.

 

Imagine a centre-panned track - equal voltage from both speakers. Now - instead of pot panning, imagine that we delay the right side by, say 20ms. You ear - due to the Haas effect - does not percieve this as a distinct echo. It hears it as one fused sound, but our brain can still hear that the left side is arrived sooner than the right side, so we percieve this as distinctly Left.

 

By changing the delay between left and right, we can pan anywhere in the stereo field, and even effectively beyond the left and right speakers.

 

A lot of stereo widening processors use delays, but always check mono compatibility, because some can really destroy the mono image.

[Kiwiburger]

Some reasons why beginner mixes might lack wideness:

 

1 - tracks panned centre, and stereo effects applied. The effects themselves (chorus, reverb) might be in wide stereo, but bear in mind that the dry signal is clearly centred.

 

2 - tracks pot panned, and stereo effects applied. This might sound wider, but consider what the effects are doing. Some effects work differently to others. The terminology might change from vendor to vendor - so descriptions like "true stereo" can have different meanings.

 

Some 'stereo' effects might return a full stereo wet signal, even if the dry sound is panned hard left or right. What this effectively does is bring the sound closer to the centre. Instead of making it wider, it might actually be contraining the sound to the same stereo width as everything else.

 

Sometimes, you might get wider stereo placement by using mono effects (mono plate reverbs, mono chorus) and panning the dry and wet signals to the same place. Or - panning them to different places. This might actually be more effective than sending everything to a stereo effects buss.

 

Wideness is a relative thing. There has to be some juxtposition to allow some sounds to appear wider than others. Otherwise, you ear just compensates and everything appears the same.

[Flaat]

There's a thread on this in the other recording forum, allthough kiwi summed it up some.

 

The thread is called something like stereo-widening and rock guitars.

[TonyCrazyMan]

 

Originally posted by Kiwiburger Some reasons why beginner mixes might lack wideness: 1 - tracks panned centre, and stereo effects applied. The effects themselves (chorus, reverb) might be in wide stereo, but bear in mind that the dry signal is clearly centred. 2 - tracks pot panned, and stereo effects applied. This might sound wider, but consider what the effects are doing. Some effects work differently to others. The terminology might change from vendor to vendor - so descriptions like "true stereo" can have different meanings. Some 'stereo' effects might return a full stereo wet signal, even if the dry sound is panned hard left or right. What this effectively does is bring the sound closer to the centre. Instead of making it wider, it might actually be contraining the sound to the same stereo width as everything else. Sometimes, you might get wider stereo placement by using mono effects (mono plate reverbs, mono chorus) and panning the dry and wet signals to the same place. Or - panning them to different places. This might actually be more effective than sending everything to a stereo effects buss. Wideness is a relative thing. There has to be some juxtposition to allow some sounds to appear wider than others. Otherwise, you ear just compensates and everything appears the same.

 

 

Thanks, great replies!

 

It seems like I need to focus more on what effects do to the wideness. For instance chorus can be pretty useful but also harmful to the wideness if not used correctly. The same with reverb. In the sample I posted I noticed that the reverb and pan pot both play an important role in this sound picture. And I think I found a trick that was used in the mixing process. To me it seems like the instruments panned centered have more reverb set whereas the instruments pan pot left and right have a "room" kind of reverb set, much less noticable. Maybe such a combination also forms a wider stereo picture! I tried to pay attention to the application of chorus on this mix. I thought it was pretty sparingly, only the background electric piano had some chorus and a little on the solo guitar sound. I might have had too much chorus AND reverb on my mixes so far. Maybe that destroys the wideness a little too... Maybe there are also instruments in the mix of this sample that use the haas technique, so a combination of all these things might make the sound picture as wide as it is. From own experience with mixing, a short delay is very effective in producing a wider image. I think I have to lower the "time until delay" from over 100ms to something like 20- 40ms.

 

What happens if you apply this haas delay technique only in the mastering phase? Would it do any good?

 

I noticed that the whole drumkit is a little panned to left on this demo sample, maybe something like 20% L. It doesn't sound like that if you are not thinking about it... The background guitar is pretty much panned to right, I would say something like 60% R.

Both the kick drum and the snare are pretty loud, that might might make the mix a little less muddy. Overall everything is loud on this sample. How do they get the whole mix that loud?! The loudness causes more clearity in the sound!

 

One more thing, I noticed that this sound clip has pretty much reverb, although it doesn't feel like there is too much reverb. Generally, when you put reverb on tracks, the tracks dissapear. In this sample the reverb is there and the sound is still very close. I think the reverb engineering is good on this sample...

[greendoor]

A mastering guy only has two tracks to work with, so options for widenening are a little limited compared to what you can do at the mixing stage. Mid/Side processing and eq'ing tricks can be used to apply effects on specific instruments, but really - you have the perfect opportunity to get things right while you have the multitracks in front of you.

 

Any stereo delay effects have the potential to cause phase problems or mono incompabilities - so I believe in checking in mono frequently.

[Lee Flier]

Besides some of the excellent points already mentioned...

 

- A huge difference between professionally mixed/mastered CD's and the bedroom stuff is good converters. Cheap converters are going to have jitter, and jitter = degrading of the stereo field, collapse of the low end, etc.

 

- Home studios are often in small rooms with poor acoustics, so you will often get bad early reflections that compromise the stereo field. Room treatment can help this. Also learning proper stereo miking techniques. Another thing to remember is that if you bung up recording the drums, the whole track will sound bunged up.

 

- Gain staging is an issue. Recording and mixing at levels that are too hot will shrink the sound field. At 24 bits you do NOT have to nor want to shoot for full scale on everything. Record so that your levels peak at about -6dBfs, and when you mix, your master fader should average about -10 to -15 with most peaks also around -6. It will open up your mixes considerably if you're not pushing full scale all the time. You can bring up the overall level during mastering.

 

- Outboard reverb is still almost always better than plugins, and you can get a better stereo spread with outboard. That's not a totally blanket statement but in general it's true. Easier on the CPU too.

 

- Use lots of hi pass filters on tracks where there's nothing in the bass register (e.g. vocals) - subsonic rumble can add up and weaken the stereo spread. In bass instruments, drums and other stuff that does have low end content, you often have to cut in the 250-400 range as there tends to be mud there, which mucks up the soundfield.

 

Hope that helps!

[gtrwiz]

Originally posted by TonyCrazyMan How do I get closer to THAT?! Please listen: Vince Gill Clean Fresh sound. Beautiful!

 

What song is that? I have almost all of Vince's records, but I don't have that.

[Will Chen]

 

Originally posted by TonyCrazyMan Besides the pristine wideness they also have soft smooth thin clear treble. You can hear it on the cymbals.

 

 

If I can be blunt...garbage in garbage out. I by no means am a pro and my studio equipment is very humble indeed. However, by planning ahead, you can achieve very nice cymbals by:

 

1. using quality cymbals

 

2. micing them with a condenser (or matched pair) which has a nice presence boost

 

3. adding a slight boost in the 7 to 10k range to get a little extra "air" on them

[C JoGo]

We receive a great W i d e N e s s from the stereo imaging parameter === included in the Behringer DEQ 2496 ...you can spatially move the stereo spectrum anywhere your ears desire... about $150 used

[TonyCrazyMan]

Originally posted by gtrwiz What song is that? I have almost all of Vince's records, but I don't have that.

 

It's the song "Let's Make Sure We Kiss Goodbye" on the Let's Make Sure We Kiss Goodbye album.

 

I once took it out because of the creative clean guitar solo in that song. I later figured out that it's very clean and clear sound on that song. I would really like to achieve that good sound quality!

[C JoGo]

Find the studio he recorded the tune, in question..> ..check their "path" >> ..use Vince's guitar or similar...and make sure the room is the caliber of the same. Nothing to it......