Stereo Width

For this month’s Toolkit, we’re focusing on mix width, making your tracks as ‘widescreen’ as possible

No-one wants to go to the cinema and find that their film is on a screen that’s little better than the flat screen TV and home cinema speaker system at their mate’s house. But what is it about that scenario which disappoints? After all, we’re watching the same film with the same critically acclaimed performances. We’re still seeing the groundbreaking CGI effects we heard so much about and, unless we’re really unlucky, we’ll still be listening to the music and sound design on a 5.1 surround system. The disappointment surely stems from the fact that we like our artistic experiences to be as fully immersive as possible. We want to lose any sense of ourselves in our current time and place and ‘give ourselves’ as fully to the film (in this instance) that we’re watching, complete with a soundtrack to help transport us there.

Interestingly, music experiences are no different. Think about the ways in which human beings in the last 50 years have chosen to interact with the music they want to listen to. Live concert venues now seek out ever better acoustic design to ensure the most optimum listening experience. The sound quality of speakers, both to use as studio monitors or for domestic, hi-fi listening at home, has increased exponentially. Our best mate isn’t the only one who has invested in a home cinema system either, as more and more of us switch to bigger screens with comparable surround monitoring systems. And, of course, our headphones are now noise-cancelling, allowing us to shut out the world as we listen to music.

So why is this relevant to this month’s Toolkit? Well, it turns out we want our listening choices to provide the same immersive experience as big-screen picture. The mixes which impress us the most tend to be the biggest, most frequency-packed ones, which provide a masterful blend of treble and bass. That, if you like, provides the ‘vertical’ listening experience. But we like to be taken over by a similarly ‘horizontal’ sound too and that’s where stereo width comes into play. Understanding the tools and techniques which allow our mixes to sound wide are well worth exploring, as with key techniques and principles understood, we can apply them to any musical genre.

We’ll be looking at the pan dial, to understand that many of our most critical ‘stereo decisions’ start here, while also exploring the principles of how sounds need to be processed or programmed to sound wide. We’ll look at how we can use spatial effects such as delay to help shift our mixes further out to the sides while also exploring how working with ‘pairs’ of complementary sounds can also help achieve impressive mix width. As always, don’t forget to check out this month’s video, available alongside the audio examples.