Multi Genre Stereo imaging

[Yukon]

As being somewhat new to producing you soon find out what mastering is and how essential it is to making your final product sound great. I still havent quite figured out how to make a 'good stereo image' and its overall importance. Ive also read somewhere that its important to make the bass end of the spectrum (0-100/150hz range) mono. Can someone please elaborate on this and any kind of help on mastering would be appreciated. Only plugin I use for mastering atm is ozone5 but I heard fabfilter proQ is highly recommended.
Thanks in advance
~Yukon

 

[d-low]

ozone is great for a simple mastering.. only because it has the tools of mastering combined in one unit. multiband pressor and harmonic booster and such small things which help the over all sound, but it can be over kill.

anyway a master limiter and maybe EQ is all you should really need to get your gain right, mastering is on the verge of making a professional and viable product for DJ mixing and release.

as far as stereo image, for me kick snare and main hat want to mostly be mono so they are consistently central, integral, driving your track, stereo differential can lose its strength. pads, synth, drone, some percussion, you name it, can be much more interesting with stereo effects and panning.. but at the same time, these are mainly for dancefloor conventional pieces, if you want to make an 'experimental' piece, then go crazy!!

 

[StrifeII]

that's a big question...

start with instruments with a good stereo image in the first place. hypersampled pianos recorded in stereo, pan your pads left and right with slight differences (maelstrom is good for this, using the "shift" knob you can run the exact same sound twice, one panned left and one panned right, and seperate them easily.) the less stuff you have the better really, it's easy to muddle up stuff.

then you've got stereo delays for things like vocals, lead synths, sometimes i use them on hihats too.

try to stay away from cheap stereo imagers as much as possible. I tend to only use them to slightly enhance, not to create stereo. mine's the bluetubes one, which is okay - you can also use it to crush basses and kicks to mono, if you want to.

aside from that, I like amping stuff in guitar rig and panning left and right hard. great fun. it's entirely possible to play elements of the track from your monitors and record them with stereo mics for room noise too. it doesn't have to be good quality - a bit of weird grime can work well for mixes. but it's just something to try.

hope this helps...

 

[Rajstah Vibe]

I've found out myself, thanks to various experiments and trials, that everything it needs to be keep punchy, it should be monoised.
Reverbs and delays are fucking nice! Oh wow!!!
But how effectively they'll works on a PA?
They just make your sound messy in a big sound system.
Use them very carefully.
A pre-delay settled too long on a reverb or a delay effect, will increase the chances to a de-phasing of a sound and sound cancelling.
All of this will lead on a lost of transients and lost of clarity and punch in a mix.

Always keep testing your master channel by switching on mono and stereo your listen.
That will help you on finding stereo de-phasing problems on your mix.
Also, if you have it, have always a phase and spectro analyser on your master channel/buss.
It's a must tool that helps you on actually see how r u working.
Your ears are not so accurate sometimes.

A very loud and spread sound of pads or snares they may sounds incredibly big to you listening on stereo, but then you switch them on mono and they fucking disappear!

Mastering...
The big issue!
A basic mastering chain is EQ (linear phase), compressor, EQ (linear phase), limiter.
It's important that your channel tracks they never clips and that you get into the mastering chain (eq,comp,eq,limiter) with a reasonable headroom of 3/6db and never ever clip the signal before the limiter!

This is my experience.
To you your experimentation...
Have fun on trying things!

 

[StrifeII]

Always keep testing your master channel by switching on mono and stereo your listen.
That will help you on finding stereo de-phasing problems on your mix.

That's interesting, was just talking about mono/stereo mixing with somebody the other day and answered a few questions for me, cheers!

Incidentally how much do you think you should take the mono mix on board when balancing everything? In a perfect world you'd never have to worry about it - but I try to find the halfway point between a good stereo mix and a good mono mix, I think if you optimize to either 100%, then the other will always sound bad...

 

[marcelkennard]

Good question!

Stereo Mixing is absolutely crucial if you want a professional sound.
I've been learning as much as I can about techniques and have a couple of important tips.

As a general rule of thumb you'll want the lower frequencies to be completely mono up until about 200hz. From there on up to 20K you really want to aim for a kind of cone shape getting wider and wider as the frequencies are higher. With most sounds it helps to process them using multibands, ensuring the lows are nice and mono for punch and the highs nice and wide for air.

There are loads of ways to improve the width of the stereo image but it REALLY helps having a solid stereoizing plugin- Ozone 5 advanced Imager or NuGen Stereoizer 3 are both brilliant for multiband stereoization- and neither of these will be of detriment to the quality of the sound when widening!

 

[ShankParade]

ozone is great for a simple mastering.. only because it has the tools of mastering combined in one unit. multiband pressor and harmonic booster and such small things which help the over all sound, but it can be over kill.

anyway a master limiter and maybe EQ is all you should really need to get your gain right, mastering is on the verge of making a professional and viable product for DJ mixing and release.

as far as stereo image, for me kick snare and main hat want to mostly be mono so they are consistently central, integral, driving your track, stereo differential can lose its strength. pads, synth, drone, some percussion, you name it, can be much more interesting with stereo effects and panning.. but at the same time, these are mainly for dancefloor conventional pieces, if you want to make an 'experimental' piece, then go crazy!!

how do you go about leveling volume in the overall mix, i try to keep my master fader at 6db of headroom. but everything sounds quiet when i level volume. OH fuck me