Make your stereo super wide
Here’s another audio post tip:
Sound effects, especially backgrounds, offer opportunities to use wide stereo effects and ambiances. There are two advantages: One, you create a bigger soundscape and, two, pushing sounds to the stereo extremes leaves room in the center for dialogue.
I often use the stereo widener effect from effect from Izotope Ozone 4. But what other tricks are there? Use two different mono recordings of the same space and hard pan them. Take the same sound, duplicate it, and hard pan the results. Then, place a chorus effect on one side. Substitute a pitch shift and adjusting the Cents (not Semitones) on one side can work, too. Or try using a high-pass filter on one side and a low-pass on the other. These effects don’t always translate into mono though, so be careful to check your results.
But my favorite approach is to duplicate a BG sound to another track and offset it by half its length, then hard pan the two tracks. Since the Left and Right channels are different in time (but from the same place), the effect is a very wide stereo leaving a nice whole in the middle for the dialog. What’s especially important about this technique is it sums to mono well.
4 Comments
[...] There has to be room for the dialog, so moving music, sound effects, and especially background ambiences out and away from the center is useful. A stereo widener is the key, and I use the one in iZotope Ozone 4 for my work. You have to be careful with these, though, and make sure any widening you do is mono compatible. You don’t want part of your soundtrack sounding funny or going missing altogether if your work gets played in mono (or through out-of-phase speakers). Always check the mono compatibility of your work. Always. One of my favorite stereo widening tricks is … well … the subject of another post! [...]
An old trick that I just picked up last year, was to do the similar panning with the guitar track, duplicate and pan hard left and right. And then for the panned left channel, send the post to reverb and pan most of the reverb to the right channel. Then do the same with right panned channel – panning the post send reverb to the left. This seems to fill things out more for the guitar. It can also muddy things up a bit if you over pan or saturate the reverb.
Great tip … I do the reverb trick regularly and didn’t mention it. See that’s what’s great about a blog and ‘crowdsourcing’. Collectively we know an awful lot, and now there’s a forum to share it. Keep those comments a-comin’ everybody!
[...] If you’re working in stereo make sure there is a hole in the center stereo field for the voice track. This mixing technique requires leaving solo and midrange instruments and sound effects OUT of the stereo center and balancing them to either the left or right speakers. This leaves space in the middle for the voice track. Similarly, super wide stereo is a solid trick that can open up the necessary space. Read this article on that subject. [...]