Stereo Widening – Adding Width In Live 8

Stereo Widening – Adding Width In Live 8

This is a guest post Written by Josh Smith aka ‘Freq Maverick’.

Stereo Widening – Adding Width In Live 8

Everyone wants to make the nice big synths and bass sounds. So here are a few tips for the beginners and intermediate users out there. I’ll be using 3 tricks that can be done in Live without any plug-in assistance. The last two are achieved by using a free plug-in and one paid plug-in.

Simple Delay

Load up Simple Delay in any audio or midi track.

Change from Sync to Time

Change the L or R time up to 20.0 ms. Leaving the other at 1.00 ms.

Stereo Widening – Adding Width In Live 8

Stereo Widening – Adding Width In Live 8

Apply to any synth or percussion track. Adding this to your hats and claps adds some nice separation from the rest of your sounds. Increasing the time delay past 20ms can become too noticeable to the listener and will make whatever this is applied to sound off beat. Of course A/B this effect to hear what’s happening.

Track Pan and Delay

For this effect go to your lead synth or melody.

Pan the original track all the way right (50R) and pan the duplicated track all the way left (50L)

Stereo Widening – Adding Width In Live 8

Now click the D button to open up the Delay’s for each track.

On the delay box for the track panned far left, type in -14

This will now play the delayed track ahead of the non delayed track by 14ms. This effect, similar to using the Simple Delay is what’s called the Haas Effect. Which means the sound that comes first (in our case the pre-delayed track) determines the perceived location of the sound. And the sound that arrives later (our non delayed track) seems to have increased in loudness also seeming to be bigger or wider.

Flanger

With Live’s Flanger effect a very neat and useful trick can be achieved. Turn Feedback to 0, Dry/Wet to 50% and Delay Time to 4.70ms and leave the rest of the settings as is.

This will give the listener a feeling that the sound is coming from above the speakers. Or course automating any of the parameters can yield different more interesting results.

 Free Plug-in: VescoFX – vFxFreeHaas

This free plug-in from VescoFX combines many of the previous effects into one easy to use piece of software. “…a more natural sounding pan effect, more clarity in the center of your mix, or just an interesting stereo VST effect.” This free tool is easy to use and can immediately hear the differences it makes. With a few presets built in you can easily pick the one that gives the result you’re looking for. There is also a paid version that offers more enhancements.

Paid Plug-in: iZotope – Ozone 4

Ozone is a great all around mixing/mastering plug-in that has a few other uses besides sitting in the master bus. I picked up this trick from watching the YouTube channel, Pensado’s Place. Into The Lair is a GREAT collection of videos to check out for any level of production you are at now.

With Ozone 4 loaded click on “Multiband Stereo Imaging”. Activate it.

Stereo Widening – Adding Width In Live 8

Each band corresponds to a certain bandwidth (frequency range) that can be individually delayed and widened

With bands 3 and 4 select values between 0.2 and 0.4 for widening. Band 2 will stay as is while band 1’s width will be brought down. Just like using Live’s Utility device and bringing down the width from 100%.

Lastly type in 0.1 into one of the Delay [ms] boxes. Just like before delaying will add some nice sparkle to the stereo image. This trick is great for making space in the center of your mix for vocals.

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