Today I'm going to show you six tips for adding stereo widths to your tracks. Hey, guys, it's will
from ED Tips, where each week I show you how to seriously up your EDM production game regardless
of genre. So, today I'm delving into the vault from a few years ago and I've got this great video
I never actually shared with you, which is six different techniques for creating stereo width in
your tracks and there is a bonus seventh technique for how to create wide sounding drums. If you like
this video, please smash like consider subscribing to my channel for tips like this each and every
week, and don't forget to download my free mixing guide completely free below this video as well.
I'm showing these techniques in Ableton Live but you can do them in any DAW just
by following these steps. So, without further ado let's hop into the DAW and get it done.
Okay, so first off, I would say put some headphones on
because then you can really hear the difference between mono signals and stereo signals.
This is just a little loop to demonstrate. This is what it sounds like full stereo mode.
this is in mono.
So, you can see there's a big difference. So, how can we make that riff nice and wide sounding? I'm going
to go through an order. One - the haas effect. H-A-A-S. Now, all this is is delaying the exact same signal
very slightly and then panning one signal left and one signal right, the slightly delayed signal right.
So, let's have a quick look at that. So, I've just duplicated the riff.
So, I'm just going to shift that riff slightly to the right,
and now I can pan one left a certain amount and one right. Now listen to it.
And this is what it was like before with just one of them.
So you can hear the difference. Okay, number two - reverb and delay. So, we've got our mono signal.
So, we are just going to add some delay on that first, ping pong delay.
Similarly we can do that with reverb.
So, you can hear that's making a stereo effect. Okay, number three, and this is really what it all
comes down to. It's processing the left channel slightly differently from the right channel,
and that's how your ears can pick up the difference because if the left channel is
exactly the same as the right channel it just sounds mono. Okay, so what you could do is... I'm
just going to double up that riff. Exactly the same sound fully panned left, fully panned right. Sounds
the same because they're the same signal. So, what we could do is perhaps add some mild distortion
to one side, and you can do this with anything: you can do it with saturation, you can do it with eq,
and you can hear it's starting to spread out those different sounds. Let's try it with a phaser.
So, you can hear it's making a stereo spread. Okay, number four - auto panners.
So, we've got our normal centrally aligned riff with no effect on it,
and an auto pan will swing the signal from left to right using an LFO.
And if you do it faster,
you can get some crazy stereo effects. Number five - modulation plugins. Now this, again, is really back
to that principle of the left channel being processed differently from the right channel.
Now, phasers, and flanges, and things like that are very good at making stereo effects.
So, you can hear it's having a stereo effect.
Now, another great way to process each channel differently is just to use different sounds.
So, we've got this riff, we'll double it up and we're just going to change one synthesizer in
the right channel to be slightly different from the one in the left channel. Now they could be
completely different if you wanted. You could have a piano sound in the right channel and that synth
sound in the left but what I'm going to do is just alter the waveforms in the right-hand synthesizer,
and instantly you can hear it sounds wide. You could do this with three or four different synth
sounds if you like, and some soft synths like silence have that capability built into it, so
you don't even need to create a different channel with different synthesizers on them. Okay, guys, so
I thought I'd give you a little bonus, which is to do with drums. So, say you've got your main
kick and snare in whatever genre you're producing, if you pan the snare left and right, you can lose
that central power but if you layer up too many drums, it can sound too messy. So, here's a trick:
you've got your drums and they're all mono,
so you want to add some width to them. Now, you can do this by adding a little reverb to the clap, as
we discussed in the other points earlier, or you can add little complementary sounds around the
clap and just pan those really hard left and right. So, say we've got a couple of human clap sounds.
Let's put those in, and now what we're going to do is just delay them slightly before and after the
main clap or snare sound. Now, remember this works in any genre, I'm just doing an example with house.
So, we've got one of our sounds here and we've got the other one
just after. I'm going to pan them hard left and right ,either side of the main clap,
and now let's listen to it.
And you might also do this with some hi-hat sounds. So let's just add a couple of hi-hat
sounds very low in the mix but left and right. So, there you have it. That is how you can make
your sounds lovely and wide without destroying the power. So, there you have it, guys. That is
how I presented a few years ago when was just starting out on this EDM Tips journey.
Still, the content is really useful, so do try it out and let me know in the comments below
what you're gonna try out in your next track and how you get on with it. All right, guys, I will
see you in a couple of days. Thanks again for watching and until next time, cheers and happy
producing!