![]() Sending more signal to the reverb unit will make that part feel like it’s further or deeper in the mix less and the part will feel much closer to centre-stage. The first thing that comes to mind here is, of course, reverb, the very point of which is to create an artificial sense of 3D space in your music!Ī standard use of reverb is to setup a main reverb unit in a bus channel, and send varying amount of your track’s parts to the unit, so that they all sound like they’re situated in the same space. Sometimes, simply drawing the listener’s attention to the stereo space in your track can be enough to suggest a sense of width. Using Effects: Delay, Reverb & Pan Modulation Even just a few cents could do the trick!ģ. Those which affect phase are particularly helpful here, such as a phaser, chorus or flanger, and tweaking the tuning just a tad will help also. The same goes for loops - as you likely won’t have a variation of the audio file to hand, you can try applying effects to a copy of the original loop. The two parts need to be different enough so that they don’t end up phasing with each other too much and causing unwanted dips in their combined amplitude, so if playing the two parts together sounds weird when compared to soloing the original, you’ll need to keep tweaking to get them to fit. You can mitigate this by giving the second synth version a different voicing, or changing some detail of the synth’s parameters, such as the waveforms used to generate the sound, or effects applied. ![]() As synths are ostensibly designed to give you more or less the same result every time you use a certain patch or preset, you have to avoid ‘beating’ that can occur when two very similar waveforms mix out of phase with each other, causing a loss in amplitude or volume. When dealing with loops or synths, you’ll need to be careful of phasing issues. This will give you a strong lead vocal presence, plus contributing stereo width that might just be the lift your chorus needs.Ģ. This will create a really wide, expansive effect that sounds fantastic on guitars but might be a little disorientating for lead vocals.įor vocals, you could try having a main part panned centrally, then recording 2 additional versions that are panned left and right, as well as being mixed in a little lower than the main part. To double-track an instrumental audio part in your mix, simply record a second version and try panning the two parts hard left and hard right. As well as producing a more forceful and accentuated result, panning the two parts differently creates a sense of stereo width that would otherwise be entirely absent from a single, mono recording. This age-old technique goes back to the foundations of studio recording, typically being applied to guitar and vocal parts to help beef them up in the mix.Ī classic and very simple example would be for a vocal part to be double-tracked for the chorus section, wherein a second take is recorded and mixed with the original. To this end, I’m proud to present to you 5 tips for expanding out the stereo field of your track - let’s dig in! ![]() When considered in a much subtler (and, arguably, more sensible) context however, width is absolutely something you can and should be playing around with in your music.įrom spacing out those pads to achieve a deeper atmosphere, through to achieving supernaturally huge vocal effects, widening out your sound can be a valuable tool in the studio. To be clear, we at ModeAudio certainly don’t condone this quest for ever louder and wider tracks simply for their own sakes - if something is to be louder, or wider, then there should be a good reason for it! Speed forward to today’s glut of hyper-charged, stadium-fuelled listening expectations and width, much like volume, has become a hunt for an ever more overblown peak. Since then, we’ve moved from a ubiquity of monophonic playback systems to stereophony, giving mixing engineers and producers the option to artificially ‘place’ a given sound in the space between the listener’s left and right speaker. The notion of ‘width’ in the context of recorded sound has come a long way since Thomas Edison first unveiled his phonograph on an unsuspecting public.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |