Common Mixing Mistakes – Collapsed Stereo Image – 10 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Boomy or Thin-Sounding Mix – 1 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Edgy, Fatiguing Sound – 2 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – No Sparkle and Bottom – 3 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Large Swings in Spectral Balance – 4 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Insufficient Detail – 5 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Not Enough Punch – 6 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Too Much Compression – 7 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – The Chorus Doesn’t Climax – 8 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Washy Sound with No Depth – 9 of 12
- Common Mixing Mistakes – Collapsed Stereo Image – 10 of 12
Collapsed Stereo Image
Suppose you’ve hard-panned a number of tracks, but your mix still doesn’t sound as wide as you’d like. What’s wrong with this psychoacoustic picture?
Your hard-panned tracks might have too much bottom end. Bass frequencies are inherently omnidirectional, meaning it’s hard for the human ear to determine where they originate. That’s because bass frequencies have long wavelengths, and easily wrap around the listener’s head to either ear with minimal phase difference.
From a stereo-field perspective, tracks that are panned hard left and hard right are potentially the most directional elements of a mix, whereas center-panned tracks are the least directional. The more the prominent omnidirectional bass frequencies are in hard-panned tracks, the more the hard-panned tracks’ perceived positions in the stereo field get pulled toward the center. Conversely, rolling off bass frequencies on hard-panned tracks will move them farther from the center.
FIG. 6: The iZotope Ozone 3 plug-in bundle includes a Multiband Stereo Imaging component that can independently widen the stereo image of up to four frequency bands of a track.
There is no magic frequency at which omnidirectionality occurs. Sound becomes progressively more omnidirectional as its frequency gets lower. So the lower in frequency the bass content of a panned track, the more it will move toward the center (assuming that the high frequencies also present in the track don’t compensate). Even hard-panned tracks with a lot of low-midrange frequency content will move slightly toward the center image.
To make a mix sound wider, try rolling off the bass and possibly some low-midrange frequencies on hard-panned tracks. Also, hard-pan tracks with lots of high-frequency content — such as cymbals, shaker, and piccolos — to gain more apparent width. If you still need more width in your production, running a single stereo track through a stereo-imaging plug-in such as Waves S1 Stereo Shuffler or iZotope Multiband Stereo Imaging (which is part of the Ozone 3 multicomponent plug-in bundle) will do the trick nicely. Be judicious, however; using this kind of processing on multiple tracks or on an entire mix can quickly make your production swim in a washy, diffuse soup (see Figs. 5 and 6).
this is awesome info. i DEFINATELY learn from my mistakes…if i know i made them! thanks for this. m