Hey fellow producers! I need advice!
When it comes to mixing my songs, I always encounter this problem. I'm mixing in the box with soft synths. And my mixes are always a bit too narrow compared to more professional productions. So I do a lot to make them sound wider. One thing I do for example on lead synths or pad synths is that I copy an instrument (soft synth) and hard pan the two instances left and right. This way I get a decent and wide stereo image. But there's a big problem with that. As soon as I listen to the mix in mono, these sounds are a lot lower in volume than in stereo. And I assume that this happens because of phase cancellations.

Now whatever I do, if I use a micro delay or pitch shifting to achieve a better stereo image, these sounds always become lower in volume in the mono mix.
And if I mix for mono compatibility so that they won't loose volume, the stereo image is not as wide as in other professional productions.
Can anyone help me out of this dilemma?
I know you can achieve a lot with mid side eqing. But how to do that right?
Is there anything else I can do? What do you think about this?

 

Use the synth in stereo mode (no L/R splitting) and set the entire mix to mono (on your output bus) and mix it to your linking. Then activate the stereo mode and listen to your mix and watch the correlation. Send the synth to an auxilary bus (send/return busses) and put MSED on that bus so you'll filter out the MID and let just the Side pass through (cheq with a FFT, you may need to put in mono before sending to aux anything under 400 Hz). Now blend in the Side on that oux bus - sometimes you can go over 0 to +6 dB until the correlation reaches center point (remember, don't go on the negative side). This approach not only it will increase the stereo presence but will have 0 effect on your mono mix, as you deal with only side signal on your aux bus.
This first part will solve your mono compatibility but the overall width of the mix is correlated to how wide is the synth in the first place.

Additionally, you can double up your synth, slightly modify the filter & amp envelope (this is to avoid phase cancellations to some extent), or you can try with a straight copy of the patch, eq out anything under 400 Hz and widen that sound over 100% and blend it in your mix. Sometimes this second synth works to have it also in mono (for added RMS - you have to go back to mono mix) sometimes is enough to let only the Side pass through (with MSED) and have it on only when listening to your track in stereo.

Also, remember when sidechaining, to take out more of the Mid than the Side (for example Pro-Q is able to do that) - it will sound slightly pumpy in mono, but it will sound great in stereo.

 

man i remember when i was on this journey. best thing i can tell you is layer everything and find a balance between them.

 

Thank you jaxyflash and AwDee.O for your valued advice! I really appreciate that! I will go and try your suggestions! Any more help from seasoned producers?

 

delayed dual echo on an aux track (stereo) also working nicely, should check the fundamental frequency of your timbre and search a starting delay time which not cancel it out with comb filtering



the first three is the most important so if the fundamental of your timbe is 180Hz than should start with 20ms delay on the first + 5ms(25ms) on the second echo(there is strong comb filtering on 25,75,125,175Hz) then play them till you can hear the needed doubling then add some chorus (subtle modulation around 0.1Hz) + saturation to it to able to hear it more

 

Last edited: Apr 23, 2016

simpler version same principles, single echo on mono synth

 

I'd take my advice if I were you.

 

I will definitely!! It's great advice already! Just hoping to gather more.

 

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Hans242Member

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This TR Meter looks great! Which developer is this?​

 

I do not want to start whole new thread about that but can you guys please tell me that what phase problems can I get while using eq?

I do not record. I use samples and synths. And I do manage to get rid of phase by comparing my waveforms. But I do not know about effect of phase while applying eq. I have watched many tutorials on managing phase problems but I still dont know how to know what eq is doing to my mix regarding phase.

 

from what I've found an eq doesn't change the volume of frequencies instead it phases them out in turn changing the shape of the waveform. so basically us a linear eq when you can though it can hit your cpu hard when used a lot.

 

http://www.dancemusicproduction.com/index.php/tutorials/edm-sessions-tutorials/sessions-06-eq

> Session 04: IIR, FIR and Phase: 19 minutes Here we discuss FIR and IIR filters, which is best for a given situation and also discuss the phase and pre-echo (ringing) ‘problems’ introduced by EQ.

 

IK Multimedia

 

I encountered the same problem with sampled mono rhythm guitars VIs. And unfortunately, just like your situation, you can't just simply duplicate your track and pan one hard to one side and the opposite side with the other -- they're still the same track, and will therefore create unholy phasing problems. For the longest time, the best way I could figure to do it was to duplicate the MIDI track and add a little bit of humanization to one of them (onset timing, velocity, note length), then, nudge that track a little bit forward, to approximate what really happens when double-tracking guitars (a human being playing the same parts, rather than having the exact same notes and performance being played twice). This actually might work for you. I could never find that "enough" spot -- it was always either too much, which spread the guitars out too wide, or too close, which would still create plenty of phasing. Fortunately, they eventually came up with double-tracked guitar samples and programming that emulated it a lot better than I was doing.

In between the time I spent trying to create humanized guitar parts and technology catching up with me, I did stumble across a few plugs that supposedly also do this. Try something like this: http://www.benvesco.com/blog/mixing/2009/mix-recipes-heavy-guitar-haas-and-eq/

 

Thank you, Iggy! You should however consider that I was talking about doubling a soft synth track, not just a normal recording. Just in case you didn't. Because soft synths are different in that they completely synthesize the sound from scratch in every new instance. So it's a bit like you have two different hardware synthesizers and synchronize them over midi and then hard pan them left and right.
Still the outcome for me here is not as great as it should be like I described in my post, because they still synthesize the sounds in the same way and so the difference are not too big, even with altering the sound on one instance.I can't alter the sound too much because that wouldn't sound so good to my ears.

I already take midi humanizing into account, but the problem I have with that and also with (haas) micro delay and pitch shifting is that I always feel like the sound that I delayed is lower in volume and then I try to compensate this with the level and then the whole image of the sound gets even more chaotic...

 

The first part is really a great trick! I tried that and it works for me!
The second part is very close to what I already do. Sometimes I even take three instances, two hard panned instances and one instance I make mono. But then I have to fight another fight often. The one one the cpu side.
And I don't like to freeze/bounce soft synths too early in the mix, because I loose the ability to tweak the sounds in the whole mix, which I do very often. Good, you could say then unfreeze it for the moment... Well, yeah that's kind of a solution. But I really like it more when everything in the mix is organic and not frozen. More like an emulated hardware setup.