School Home
Members
articles

Welcome to Musician War School
CapnZilog

Your Account

• Submit
article
• Your
articles
• Your
queue (0)

Guitar Secrets

• Artist
Analysis (48)
• Chords
(23)
• Exercises
(37)
• Gear
(8)
• Gear
Reviews (4)
• Harmony
(6)
• Lessons
(21)
• Personal
Licks (37)
• Picking
(11)
• Rhythm
(2)
• Scales
(27)
• Songwriting
(20)
• Studio
Overviews (16)
• Sweeping
(38)
• Tapping
(16)

Most viewed

• GE
Lightblub Commercial
(2029)
• So,
you want to pick cleaner, huh???
(1840)
• REAL
arpeggios (none of that Jonezter crap!!!!)
(1671)
• Holy
Jumping Arpeggios Batman!
(1103)
• triads
of sweep picking (1102)

Stereo Spatialization For
Bigger Mixes

Studio Overviews

Posted by CapnZilog - Jun 24, 2006
@ 03:20:22 AM

mp3

Breathe life into your tracks by
using Synthetic Early Reflections

[From the Reader
Mailbag]

My guitar tracks sound too up-front and
lack a sense of space. They clearly need some kind of
ambience, but I don't want to use reverb. What to do?
Help!

A strange thing about mixing is that one of
the things we do most often, namely recording tracks that are
dry, mono & direct, has a wholly unnatural sonic
character. Unless you're sitting in an anechoic chamber (a
room completely devoid of acoustic reflections), this sound
does not exist in nature. The closest thing to it might be
listening to recorded music played outdoors. Assuming that
there are no trees, rocks or other obstacles for the sound to
bounce off of, the effect is oddly empty and ambiguous. It
doesn't sound right, but it's hard to say exactly why -
something is 'missing', but what?

What's 'missing' are
the early reflections. Our brains (and ears) are magnificent
analyzers of acoustic ambience; without even thinking about
it, we can turn our head and locate someone calling us with
our eyes closed. In fact, we expect to be able to do this
because every sound we hear is mixed in with reflections that
have bounced off various obstacles in the room as well as the
walls of the room itself. But when we record direct, there's
no ambience at all. The brain is listening for it, but it's
not there - and something registers subconciously as "weird."
In what way? Well, the most common adjectives might be too "up
front", "unnatural", or "too direct."

Most reverb has
two components; the early reflections, and the "tail". The
"tail" is the long wash of sound that we associate with
reverb, responsible for muddying our mixes and interfering
with the clarity of things. However, it's not this but the
early reflections that our ears use to determine the size and
type of room that a sound is sitting in. And unlike reverb,
we're not talking about long, distracting decays of sound -
we're just talking about just a few echoes, the initial
results of sound bouncing off the ceiling, floor, and
neighboring walls.

On MW, everybody's got their
favorite guitar patches and most of them involve some kind of
time-based effect. And although it's not intuitive, effects
like pitch-shifting and chorus also fall into this category.
When performed in stereo these delays help provide a synthetic
ambience that reduces the 'recorded dry, mono & direct'
(RDMD?) effect. Same goes for stereo delays and stereo
reverbs, of course - and in fact, even double-tracking your
parts in stereo provide a kind of 'synthetic ambience.'. Many
of these techniques will give you a pleasant sense of space,
without the reverb mush. So what do the studio pros
do?

The coolest solution is to create your own
synthetic early reflections and it's actually very easy to do.
The most common method involves a single short delay which was
used by producer Bruce Fairbairn all over Van Halen's album
"Balance". Try this:

1) Take a dry mono guitar track,
pan it hard left, and clone it.
2) Take the clone, pan it
hard right, and delay it by about 12ms-30ms.
3)
Play.

Man, that did that bring the sound to life, or
what? Now try varying the amount of delay. Depending on the
length of the delay time, the sound is going to get "wider" or
"narrower" in space - but one thing it won't be, is
irritatingly in your face. As you go above 30mS, you begin to
lose the effect - it starts to sound more like slapback or
chorusing. And much below 12mS, the effect begins to sound
more like panning than widening.

(for more info on
this, see: http://www.musicianwar.com/school/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haas_effect)

A
side effect of using single early reflections is that it may
affect the balance of the stereo image a bit. For example,
delaying the right channel by 12mS will make the sound wider
yet slightly louder on the left, so you might want to raise
the gain of the right channel to counteract this. A common
variation for vocals is to use two different short delays with
one panned left, the other right, and the dry signal straight
up the middle. Sounds awesome, and it doesn't affect the
centering of the stereo image.

Craig Anderton's "SONAR
3 Mixing & Mastering" has one of the best chapters on
creative use of the Haas effect I've ever read. There's a lot
more you can do with it than what I've described here,
particularly in combination with other effects. The
possibilities are endless!

As an example, the .mp3
example in this tutorial contains several takes of a RDMD
guitar track processed as follows:

Take 1: Mono guitar,
dry

Take 2: Dry in left channel, 13mS delay in
right
...(note how the delay draws the listener's ear to
the left)

Take 3: Dry in left channel, 23mS delay in
right
...(does the stereo image sound wider or narrower
than in Take 2?)

Take 4: 13mS delay in left channel,
23mS delay in right
...not something you'd usually do - no
dry signal here

Take 5: Dry in center, 13mS in left,
23mS in right
...(with the delays being deliberately mixed
a bit lower in gain
than the "direct"
signal as would happen in real life)

Take 6: Mono
guitar, dry
...same as Take #1 for comparison purposes ...
yuck!

-djh

8 comment(s) | viewed 210
time(s) | |

Your Comments

Commented by Nagi - Aug 24, 2006 @ 10:00:04
PM

I just learnt something.
Thanks!!!

Commented by Gump - Jul 01, 2006 @ 06:35:44
PM

Thanks for the bit of info
Sharkfin. Makes more sense now!

Commented by Pabligula - Jun 30, 2006 @
09:56:39 PM

By the way I believe that the
chanel that has the delay, you must use only the dely sound,
the wet ! not the mix.

In Sonar, you could sends
changed to post and route one to left and the other to right.
So there will be no need of clonning the track.
Ciao.

Commented by Pabligula - Jun 30, 2006 @
09:54:39 PM

Great post and great examples...
!!! I had a hard time learning this... :D:D wish you had
posted this some time ago. Thanks.

Commented by Gump - Jun 28, 2006 @ 01:04:12
PM

Sweet! Thx CapnZ. Between this and
yours and Majic's posts on the Help section of the MB, there
is a wealth of knowledge here. The sample MP3 really kicked it
in as well! Great job on this article!

Commented by CapnZilog - Jun 24, 2006 @
09:32:51 PM

It's a good idea to check your
results in mono when using time-based effects like this
because they can also affect the EQ of the signal somewhat.
Use your ears and tweak to taste!

Commented by Gump - Jun 28, 2006 @ 06:54:06
PM

I've read about checking your mix
in mono, but I figured that it would change the dynamics I was
going for within the stereo field. I didn't really understand
what tbey meant by that though. Is that the only reason you
would do it is to check your time based effects?
Thx!

Commented by sharkfin - Jun 29, 2006 @
02:17:55 PM

Awesome article!!  Gump, back
in the day they said it was possible that your cassette tape
might just get dumped into a mono player or the speakers in
the A&R guys office could be out of phase etc.  So
the old rule was to always check your mix in mono to make sure
you had no left and right phase cancels and that it just
sounded ok should your demo get played on less than optimal
gear.  I always pictured some grumpy old man with a Kmart
tape deck and a  big trash can off the edge of the
desk.  I still do checks in mono.  Ozone 3 has this
built in as well as a meter to watch to let you know when
things have gotten too wierd.  Too wierd meaning that the
stereo image has gone too far, like that fake "wide" sound
some boom boxes have that sometime just don't sound
right.

Submit
Your Comment

v2.0 2001-2004