More Stereo

[karl-heinz]

hmm i don't quite get that phase stuff but the blue area in the center definitively shows me the stereo angle. if i pan a hi-hat all the way to the right it does show me.

[Stomper]

I never used the one you are using (waves?) but when checking with Pinguin or Izotope, yes it does show it on the right, but it so small comparing to 2 hi hats with phase cancelation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_cancellation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_cancellation

In short, 2 identical wave forms, if you set one to have negative phase in the exect time the other wave is positive, there will be full cancellation.
if you take my exemple with the hi hat and wont make the small delay between tham, you wont hear anything. if you pan each one to diffrent place in the panorama, it wont be full cancellation and there will be a bit diffrence between that sound on left and the right=bigger stereo image.
If you make a few ms delay, the positive and negative wont be the at the exect same time, so no full cancellation. that how usualy stereo imager works as far as i know, never got to deep into it.

It a known way to make things bigger, lets say you have a pad, try leave only the low and low mid in the center (or about 30-50 L&R). than duplicate it twice so you have 3. remove the eq from those two and pan one to the L (60-100) and the other to the same but on the right and do a phase reverse on both. its just an exemple of course, you can do phase reverse and play with the pan and frequencies in million ways.

[steevio]

ok. i should have been more specific.
actually this was exactly about kick and bass.
i compared some of my synthetic kicks (drumatic, live operator) to kick samples and kicks from commercial productions (the one in the screenshot is from butch - on the line oxia mix).
and i tried it out. a doubler does actually do the trick (to some extent) but i just can't get used to the idea of doubling anything in the low frequency region. just feels dangerous to me apart from the fact that it doesn't really work.
any ideas?

have we not just been talking round in circles here ?
you're just askin about kick and bass, the screen shot is probably just showing that theres some reverb on the kick sample you've taken, whereas your own is dry maybe ??

[Petar]

or higher feqs of kick are wider

[async]

I just want to add that acoustics and wave-physics says that if you have different low-frequency noises coming out of two separate speakers in fairly close proximity (say more than 3 feet apart, but less than 200 feet apart), you're going to have issues with phase-cancellation. Practically this means that if you have one speaker playing 80hz, and another playing inverted 80hz then you'll have some largeish holes (like 5 to 20 feet in radius) where the net presure between the two speakers will be nil... as if no sound were playing at all. With low-frequency waves (under 300 or so hz) you want to make sure it's all coming from the absolute center, and you want to make sure it's all at the same phase. You could even theoretically phase align any sounds you want on top of the bass line to make sure that they actually cause the bass to hit harder.

This is actually less important with snares because they've got lots of mid and higher frequency components that will only leave very small holes if they're not in phase. One of my favorite tricks for widening a snare is to send it to two busses with very slightly different short reverbs, one bus panned all right and one panned all left.

[::BLM::]

i
if your music is mostly going to be played in clubs, aim more towards a mono mix ( but you really need some stereo placement or it wont sound good in headphones )
if you're dancing next to a speaker stack in a club, you wont hear a thing from one half of the stereo image, so if you pan percussion too much, you are going to lose the overall groove apart from in the middle of the dancefoor.

Thats so true about not panning stuff too much. My first release I did lots of panning, then heard the track in a club and it sounded sh!t unless you stood in the middle of the dancefloor.

[s.k.]

i
if your music is mostly going to be played in clubs, aim more towards a mono mix ( but you really need some stereo placement or it wont sound good in headphones )
if you're dancing next to a speaker stack in a club, you wont hear a thing from one half of the stereo image, so if you pan percussion too much, you are going to lose the overall groove apart from in the middle of the dancefoor.

Thats so true about not panning stuff too much. My first release I did lots of panning, then heard the track in a club and it sounded sht unless you stood in the middle of the dancefloor.

thats pretty strange because club PA systems sum everything to mono.

[AK]

i
if your music is mostly going to be played in clubs, aim more towards a mono mix ( but you really need some stereo placement or it wont sound good in headphones )
if you're dancing next to a speaker stack in a club, you wont hear a thing from one half of the stereo image, so if you pan percussion too much, you are going to lose the overall groove apart from in the middle of the dancefoor.

Thats so true about not panning stuff too much. My first release I did lots of panning, then heard the track in a club and it sounded sht unless you stood in the middle of the dancefloor.

thats pretty strange because club PA systems sum everything to mono.

They have in the places we have been played out as well and a simple thing is to just check your mix for mono compatibility during mixdown, anyway, I completely agree with the jist of the post that any stereo effects on low frequency sounds just doesn't work and sounds rubbish. In fact, when summed to mono, it could cause a lot of phase issues.

When I was writing BB and DnB, any effected bass wasn't actually affecting the bass end at all, like you might add a chorus to a copy of the bass track which was then HP filtered at around 500 hz or there-abouts and simply served to add timbral interest.