A mixing question.

Hi! I've been analyzing many modern recordings through headphones. Inside the virtual world, I've noticed that a much larger stereo field exists than what I've been able to create with my recording program. When I compare through headphones between a purchased CD and one of my own recordings, my left/right field is is not as wide. I record using a Firebox into Cubase SX 2.

I've tried many different ways such as : mono with the input mixer set to full left with the cubase pan to center then after recording the audio full pan to the left with the Cubase mixer. My field is still too small. I am open to any suggestions to widen my field. I have tried stereo imagers to no real avail. Please help. I'm sitting on a killer track that is begging me to blow the stereo field wide open.

from what ive heard this is one of the problems with mixing in the box (all digital) . when you start mixing you can achieve a much wider stereo spread. again this is what ive heard i mix all in the box too, so you might wan tto wait until someone else gives their opinions.

a lot of it is just recording technique. mixing a good room sound in is a good way to widen things up. i dont think you'll get a whole lot with spreaders and the like as usually that just thins out the sound.

A lot of it is electronics, but I believe even more of it is really great stereo micing and recording techniques done in a acoustically treated room.

What specifically in your mix are you trying to "widen"? What are you recording?

I would guess you are recording stereo tracks..

Record mono tracks and then you can simply pan them wherever you want in the stereo field.

A lot of DAW software has stereo tracks as the default... Something I never understood coming from an analogue reel to reel tape world.

With mono tracks there is no reason whatsoever you could not pan them to extremes...

That'd be the easy way to do this, but I think he's asking about something else entirely, isn't he? Or no? That's why I was seeking clarification on what he was recording exactly, and what kind of music, that kind of thing.

But sure, you could have vocals up the middle, drums on one side, guitar on the other, tambourine on one side, an organ on the other. You'd get very wide "stereo", but it's not really a true "stereo field" as the original post states.

i think he is talking about phase shifting past [outside the stereo field] the speakers.

although this is CLASSIC!

try the waves s1 widener plugin, if that doesnt get you past the speaker edges, you probably are running your speaker output in mono.

Lets see you need wider space then don't record 4" away for the source might be a good start.

That creates greater depth of sound, sure, but not necessarily the stereo width that he is discussing.

Note that I said "necessarily" because if one is close and distance-micing and spreading them apart, etc. etc., it's possible to achieve this.

try using a close and distant mic panned hard l or r [same side] and use two comps on them with difference settings. between the amplitube variation and phase information, it could push it further outside...

One extremely common scheme is double tracking parts. You play the same part twice, and pan them hard left/right with slightly different amp, mic, etc... settings. This creates a very wide sound, while leaving more room in the middle for other parts. They have to be very accurately done, so that they sound like one instrument, but they do need to be two separately tracked parts for maximum effect. If you just copy the track and pan them, it'll still sound like a mono track in the center. You can delay one of them by 10 to 20ms to avoid that collapse to the center, but it still doesn't sound as good as real multi-tracking.

Other tricks include split harmonizer type effects to widen out mono tracks in a subtle way and slight widening of the mix with an imager at the end. The split harmonizer trick can really be used very effectively to create a wide and spacious sound, but you can go overboard with it.

A little Waves S1 can help but yeah, you need to address that in the mix.

I don't think digital is lacking width at all. I do think analog often has a better (or more accurately ... generally more pleasing) sense of depth which, along with width, adds to the illusion or perception of width.

It's all tied together I think... width and depth.

Regardless to what people often say ... a sound can only travel as far as the left or right speaker. Anything perceived beyond that or past that is an illusion. Good width (instrument spread) in a mix with good depth sets a soundstage that helps that illusion greatly.

I've done "wider" mixes with mostly mono sources and a couple of good stereo souces than with a ton of stereo sources.

Out of all you posts (for which I thank you all), this sounds close to what I am talking about. The tracks are recorded in mono over 2 tracks (one left, one right) direct in from a keyboard. I pan each track to full left and right. Each track is sitting at the full edge of the stereo field. However, the stereo field I am hearing in my headphones is not as wide as what I hear on other's recordings. I'll try and draw an example here...(maybe I'm just crazy)

My stereo field

L.....C.....R

L........C........R

Stereo fields I hear on professional recordings

Okay, that at least clears up a lot. We're not actually talking about true stereo, but about the perceived width.

There's some stereo widening things, although I haven't personally tried one that's really blown me away yet. I have DUY Wide, and it's okay, it messes with the phase and can make something sound a little wider. A lot of it is what the person does with the mix as a whole, and then some of it is allegedly with the summing.

its about making SOME things WIDE.... have a few things project past the speakers. you couldnt run it on the mix as a whole. first of all, in Cubase/nuendo... if you have a mono track and put a widener on it, you arent getting "stereo"... you MUST run it on a stereo aux. otherwise you are just getting one side, drove me nuts the first time i used the application because DP would make a mono track output to stereo if you used a mono>stereo plugin. hopefully the new Nuendo solves this issue. i hate having to make an Aux for one little thing i want to do like that on a single track.

things i like to widen, reverbs [some of them, not all of them... and i usually run 3+ per song of various types], put the widener following a stereo verb. pads are great in superwide... doesnt compete with whats in the normal stereo field. things in the chorus section of songs and outro's. lead guitars, especially if you have verb on it or even delay take wideners well.

im actually a widener junkie and get any and all wideners i can find, especially free ones. i havent found a best, only different.

aside from wideners, there are delay tactics as mentioned above. move your one keyboard track ahead a few ms and the other behind a few the same number of ms.

main thing is to just keep mixing... you just pick up more and more tricks all the time and after a while you build up a slew of things you can do to a mix. play with depth, width, height... and dynamics and arrangement.

Another little trick is, for something like the snare, which is so important to rock music, put a two tap delay on it. Set the taps full l/r and EQ it so that just a little of the upper but not highest freqencies of the snare are passed through the taps, and set the delay to like 30 or 40ms or something like that. Leave the taps about -6dB or something like that.

What you'll get is an effect where it sounds like the crack of the snare is bouncing off two walls at the far ends of the mix. You need to be kidn of subtle about it, though in some cases you might use it more aggressively as an effect. But little things like that can add to the width of the sound stage.

Another is just plain old split harmonizer thing. That can create the extra width effect of a track without the side effects of a widener on the overall mix. One of the things the widener does is just expand out the width of each track, which makes it sound like a bigger mix. The harmonizer effect will do that on those tracks you want it on and to separate degrees on each track as desired.

Also, if your DAW doesn't provide either two sliders for stereo tracks (or a center/width control), then probably (like SONAR) it doesn't really implement real stereo panning. It's just lowering one side relative to the other. If you put a simple panning pluggin on such a track, you can adjust the width of the track in a very natural way, assuming it's really stereo content. So if you have a stereo high hat, you can pull it out really nice and wide if you wanted to, without any tricks or processing that affects the clarity of the sound. If it's just mono content in a stereo track it won't do much good since it will always sound like a mono track halfway between the pan positions.

And, though I think it was mentioned above, if you are doing two keyboard parts, they have to be either separately performed or, if copied from a single performance, one has to be delayed about 20ms or more. Else they will not separate out fully and sound like they are way out to the side like you want. If a part that's panned out to the far edges has zero relationship to anything on the other side, it'll sound completely out to one side. Even if you perform the track twice, it'll be similar enough that it won't completely push out to the edge, but it'll sound nice and wide and thick. But if you want stuff to sound like it's way out there, play different parts on the left and right. Some combination of the two is often used in commercial recordings.

also dont forget about straight up modulation effects on things like chorus, phasers, flangers, etc... SUBTLE though.

I think what he's saying is, take a pro recording. You have a part where a single, mono track is playing, panned hard left.

Why doesn't his single mono track, panned hard left, sound near as hard left as the one in the recording? I've run into this problem sometimes, never looked into a way to solve it just worked around it.

I think a big part of the perception of width is dynamic range. Thanks sound wider when panned wide and dynamic then they do panned wide and compressed. If you look at classical or even older rock recordings with a wide soundstage they often also have a whole lot of dynamic range. It makes the space feel larger when everything is not in your face.

i have no idea what you are talking about. if you take a source and pan it on the left side, its going to be mono out the left speaker regardless. if not, there are phase issues happening.

Well obviously. But in pro recordings, it sounds FURTHER left. Not sure how else to word it, since that's more or less exactly what it sounds like.

define a pro recording... you are speaking strictly of a single source track into a channel on an analog mixer i am assuming with its pan to the left. its just in the left speaker [unless there is channel crosstalk combined with phase shifting of the electronics causing phase shift pushing it further outside the stereo field]. a panner should put the signal in the left [or right] speaker when you hard pan it. it takes BOTH speakers to cause it to go wider [from phase issues on one bothering with the other to go ouside itself]... you CAN make it go behind as well to an extent, though far more difficult to be convincing than a surround setup. sometime try flipping the polarity on a verb send to the original track [though HP it well].

if you are listening to a mastered album, then most likely there was some "enhancement" to the track either in mix or mastering....

Yup. Forget about wide... just do 'good'.

I use the S1 sometimes to help open up enter spaces in dense mixes by pushing some things farther out left / right... stereo tracks that are already panned hard L/R.

I push them out a bit to make more space for the vox in the middle if It's masking and I don't want to carve some 5k from the stereo strings or whatever. A little S1 is sometimes just the thing.

One thing I've realized is that often, I don't think my mixes sound as good as "professional" mixes.

However, I don't think my mixes really pale in comparison. They just sound like how I mix my music, and the "professional" mixes sound like someone else.

I would bet that if we could hear what the OP was hearing, we'd think it was perfectly fine. My mixes may be appreciated by others as much as "professional" mixes yet I'm too wrapped up into my sound to hear it as someone external to the situation would.

The point, I can't always see the forest through the trees. And perhaps, the OP may be too close to his work to appreciate the sound.

Also, the preception of wide can be increased with a reference of narrow. If everything in a mix were spread across the stereo field, they would all fall into the same space and lose their dimension. You can enhance the illusion with panning, of course, but then reverb (and the amount sent to the reverb), delays (tight low/no feedback delays suggest a certain space close to the sound that was fed into the delay), as well as eq (such as a lot of low suggests you are close to the source, like a voice, or rolled off lows and highs could suggest the source is off in the distance), all create an illusion of space...and not just left and right, but forward and back.

All of this gives dimension. Panning helps, but the illusion of space takes more than that.

Think of the movies where scale models are used. Star Wars for instance. A reference of a human - a Storm Trooper is placed next to a Tie Fighter, so we know in reference to a human how big a Tie Fighter is. Then, get those fighters into outer space next to the Death Star, and now we have a reference compared to the fighter, compared to the Storm Trooper, how big the Death Star is. But in reality, the Death Star is probably no larger than a beach ball. Perception in audio is the same thing, but the reference to audible space is the key.

But then again, perhaps we all have ideals of what something should sound like when we create it but may fail at times (in our own minds), and accept and appreciate what we hear from others for what it is...without a lot of second guessing.

Yes, no, maybe?

I think what he's saying is that, it sounds "mono-ish" and when he pans something all the way to the right, you can still hear it some on the left.

I think it's probly your computer components. Really.

I used to have a Dell, and I used Cubase 3. I would have a very mono-ish sound and I could never get something to come out on only one side after mix-down.

I now own a MacBook Pro and I record into Logic Pro 7, and I have a full, left-to-right stereo field.

I don't know ecxactly what components made the difference, but I know that I upgraded to a better computer, a better operating system, and definitely a better DAW(sorry cubase fans, but come on seriously) and I then had a full stereo field, and was able to produce way better recordings.