How to… use contrast and restraint for wide yet monocompatible mixes
Adding stereo information to almost any source sound will make it sound perceptively ‘better’, especially when you turn said widening plugin on and off and compare the newly-widened version against the unprocessed signal. This means that stereo effects can quickly become addictive. But if every part of your track is impressively wide, the overall focus of your stereo image will be lost. So use contrasting types and amounts of spatial positioning to carefully set up the perfect image for your track: for example, use gentle auto-pan on one element, a wide reverb on another, an overt Haas delay on another, and so on.