Nowadays, stereo wideners are pretty popular. Producers like widening their mixes to create an extensive stereo image. The goal is to create an immersive experience for the listener by using sounds that appear to move in 3D rather than 2D. On the other hand, a stereo field collapse is a drawback of excessive widening. At a point, too much broadening of the stereo field produces a deformed stereo picture where the sides collapse, and the central information is lost. In this tutorial, I will show you how to use the delay effect to manipulate the stereo width of your audio.
I’ve created a short sequence in SoundBridge: DAW that contains traditional full-mix elements, including a simple guitar riff. Let’s listen to the whole mix first and then the guitar riff.
~Full Mix – Guitar (Unprocessed)
~Guitar – Solo (Unprocessed)
Use a Stereo Delay to Create a Haas Effect
The guitar riff is somewhat loud, as you can hear, but it sounds mono. I want to expand it over the stereo field because it’s the main instrument in my mix. We could duplicate the guitar track and move the duplicate guitar riff audio to the left or right. This causes the so-called Haas effect, which we mentioned in a previous wiki tutorial. A better way to create a similar effect, and get even more options for variety, would be to apply a stereo delay effect to the original guitar riff audio channel.
Any stereo delay unit will do, but in this instance, I’ve chosen Tempo Delay by Voxengo. Let’s view its user interface.
The area of the interface with parameters to which we should pay the most attention is in the middle area. There are two distinct delay units labeled “left” and “right,” as you can see. You’ll notice that the parameters on both sides are the same. The most significant one is Delay- which is the first feature on the left. In my case, I set the left Delay to approximately 7ms and the right to 21ms. To mimic the Hass effect, it is best to keep these delay times short.
You can see the minimal Repetitions I used next to it because I didn’t need a long delay for this. While the crucial element would be to pan the left and right delays to the extreme to achieve the stereo widening I need, feedback is reasonably low for the same reason. We can see the gain at which you can experiment at the end of this section, but I set it to the maximum.
Conclusion
The interface’s bottom section contains several effects, but I only used the filters. The controls for tempo, which can be changed, and the settings for the dry and wet gain are located in the upper section of the interface. This is useful because it lets us control the audio signal’s expanded width volume. This is practical because it gives us control over the expanded guitar riff signal’s frequency range.
Once I’ve set the parameters, let’s compare the unprocessed and processed versions of the guitar riff and hear it in the whole mix.
~Guitar – Solo (Unprocessed)
~Guitar – Solo (Processed With Stereo Delay)
~Full Mix – Guitar (Processed With Stereo Delay)
If you liked this article about audio processing, here are some more on the same subject:
