Stereo W I D T H

Modern music production tends to have extremely wide sounds in it. Rock employs multiple guitar takes and panning to give you a wall of searing leads and heavy chords. Rap does a similar techniques but with vocals. Many electronic genres use stereo synthesizers and post processing to create wide sounds. This article will review a few ways you can make your sounds, or mixes, sound like they’re a mile wide.

1) Boost sides – very simply, turn your signal into a mid-side arrangement, then boost the side volume. This will make a stereo sound much wider, at the expense of potential phase issues.

2) Haas – a tried-and-tested technique courtesy of Dr. Helmut Haas in 1949, this technique simply involves delaying one side by a small amount, at most 20ms.

3) Allpass Inversion – If you take an allpass filter, subtract it from the source signal, then invert the left side, you get a pseudo-stereo effect. This can have serious phase issues, but can also sound really neat!

Imagers, like Ozone Imager, Dimension Expander, and other dedicated devices/plugins often use some or all of the above to create wider sounds.

4) Stereo Effects – reverb, chorus, ensemble, and so on, can turn a thin signal, even a purely mono signal, into a huge stereo signal.

5) Stereo Filters – using similar but different filters, such as similar cutoff but different slopes, different cutoff, and even different response curves to modulation, can make a dramatically wide sound. This can be used with other effects as well, like distortion, if you vary the bias of the input signal equally but opposite per channel.

6) Mid-side Excitation – For this, break your stereo signal into middle and side, and use an exciter, like an Aphex Aural Exciter, on the side signal. You can also EQ the sides, or do other processing. You can also compress the middle to make the side seem larger, and thus wider.

I hope these ideas have helped you out!