Why Stereo Imagers Ruin Mixes (Q&A + Better Stereo Workflows)

Welcome back. Just a bit of recap.

In video one, we had a look at a commercial release of a mix that I believe is full of mono compatibility problems. You might want to go back and watch it. It was just really condensed, deep and two minutes long.

Then in video two, we dove really deep into one of the most commonly recommended stereo technique, which is the Haas Delay. And I showed you the objections that I have and why I believe that's not a good choice. Why it causes more damage than good.

And in that second video, I could finally dive into what I really wanna talk about, which is stereo mixing techniques that I use every day, that work better, that have more natural outcomes, that don't behave poorly in mono.

And I have a whole list of things that I would like to share with you. And that's going to be covered in, the workshop, of course.

But today, I'm here to talk to you about the questions that have been posted, that have been emailed, and a couple that I just wanna clarify. So let's jump right into it.

If you're a beginner, will this be too advanced?

So, this workshop on Friday is designed for everybody who's got at least basic mixed understanding.

The workshop is designed for intermediate mix engineers and also advanced mix engineers.

If you've done a couple of mixes and generally found your way around, but you feel like there is room for improving your mixes, that's when this workshop is great for you.

If this is your very first mix, if you've never completed a mix before, then it might not be the right workshop for you.

I will keep the theory to an absolute minimum, but there are a few things that we really need to explain for everything to make sense.

But then it's gonna be practical, practical, practical. One stereo technique after the other. Excellent question. Let's move on to the next one.

My genre is different to the sound examples that you showed in your videos. Would the still be useful to me? Yes, absolutely.

the, techniques that I wanna show you in this Friday's workshop are applicable universally to any genre.

I will talk about the mono columns as I call 'em. Now, the typical instruments that we place right in the middle and why we do so. And you will find those elements in EDM songs, in folk, songs, in country songs, in reggae songs, in metal. Pretty much any genre. So therefore, it's not genre specific, although of course I'm gonna pick a song or two to demonstrate.

You can still apply the same techniques to other genres as well.

Consider it an advice buffet. I'm going to present you all the options, and then you can pick and see which works for you. There will be enough in it for every genre, of course.

Cool. Yes. Excellent question. Let's move on to the next one.

This is a good one. This is a good one. I really like this question.

Will you try to make me buy plugins?

I totally get where you are coming from. Look, there are so many people these days who present videos and actually that's just a sale pitch for a plugin. And that's definitely not what I'm going to do.

I promise.

I will not make you wanna buy plugins.

Actually, I'm going to use mainly stock plugins, as well as freebie plugins, The ones that I recommend to my Inner Circle.

I'm all about the skills and I'm not about the tools. When you have enough skills, any plugin will do if you just have the right idea in your mind.

And that's really what it's all about for me.

Skills, skills, skills and learning to hear and perceive sound.

And then you let your sense of taste guide you.

So not a plug and sales pitch promised.

Off to the next question. This is another really important one.

I work in a different DAW. Would I waste my money?

Mm, good question. Look, when it comes to mixing, most of the DAWs have almost identical feature sets.

Of course there are differences, but, uh, they all have tracks to play from. They all have plugins that you can insert.

All modern DAWs offer send routing and bussing.

Those are things that I often use.

And all of those are things that I will probably demonstrate in this workshop. You can transfer those skills from any DAW to your DAW. There's very few DAW specific things in stereo mixing, I find.

So it's more about the concepts, the, the approach, hearing, reacting, shaping it.

That's really what it's all about.

And, now, what DAW use, it honestly doesn't matter. Whichever suits you best.

Off to the next question. Isn't the stereo widening plug in all I need?

Well, it's a valid question. Why not? Well, I think this is a great opportunity for me to dive in a little bit deeper. So we already worked on the Haas delay and I demystified it a bit and showed you the pros and cons.

Let's go into stereo wideness. So why don't we just jump into Pro Tools for a moment.

It's the same session that I showed you last time and let's focus on the drum room.

So let's have a quick look where we at in the middle of the song. Perfect. Let's jump straight into it. Headphones on. Here we go.

Good. So this was recorded in a medium sized room. Therefore there is not a lot of echo on it. And it's also a mono microphone. So, stereo wideners, let's go straight into it. One of the most popular ones is by iZotope. And it's called the Imager. We can immediately see that in my DAW the metres have doubled, so left and right. So it's effectively a mono to stereo plugin, mono in stereo out, so what else do we need? I would like to jump over to my master bus. And on the master bus let's go back to my beloved MAAT two bus.

So let's have a quick listen to how the drums sound now through iZotope's Imager. Hmm.

Could, it's still a dead mono, means there's no difference between the left and the right channel. Therefore, we actually need to turn it on. So that's the button on the bottom left here, "Stereoize", let's see what it does.

Nothing, no stereo width at all, unless we take the slider here on the left hand side and actually push it towards stereo.

I'm pushing it all the way now. Lemme just play this one more time.

Bypass.

On.

Okay, so I warmly recommend you put on headphones when you listen to this because this is now a small detail that is important, but if you listen on a phone, you won't hear it. You need proper headphones for that.

So what I heard is that yes, it generates some stereo width, but at the same time it really pulls the localization to the left.

It actually pans it one way, because it's delaying the other side by six milliseconds. The vectorscope also showed, an image that was leaning to the left, giving us visual proof of what a heard already. So this is not the smartest idea, I reckon. But while we at it, let's just, double check how it actually sounds in mono.

Mm.

Okay. It's not really bad. I've heard a lot worse, but the mono sum still compromises the sound to a small degree.

So that is a problem because a lot of people, as we know, listen in mono on mono devices and now they will experience a sound degradation. So, let's see what else we can do.

There is a different mode in this plugin, and it's called Mode one and two. Let's just jump around into the next. Mm-hmm. Oh yeah. Well, a lot is happening right there. That makes it really big and wide and I don't even need to push it to a hundred percent. That's definitely too much for my liking.

Good. So first up, I noticed that it's not panning it to the left as much, it's keeping it more centred and it's giving it a little bit of width, but let's double check what it does in mono.

Mm. Here's the difference. And together. Look, the cymbals start to sound like a broken MP3 to my ears, I can hear something grindy, something gritty that I really don't like.

It actually works acceptably well in mono, but once it's stereo, it's, it's grinding my gears. I honestly don't like it.

Well, there's of course more in this plugin. We could, split it into different frequency bands and drive them differently. But you know what, this plugin I've played with a lot and is not growing on me.

And if I weigh up the pros and cons, causes more damage than good. So I'm not using it.

So what else can we use? If, if that's not it, what else can we do?

Well, let's go to a very simple old school trick. We need two devices for it. We need a processor that can work on the transients.

The one that I would like to show you now is called Bitter Sweet. It's a freebie by Flux. So let's just quickly check what this tool does. So we have two sides, a bitter side and a sweet side. Neutral. When you go to bitter.

Whoa. Gets really punchy,

it brings out the transients and reduces the tail of it.

Let's bring it back to, to unity. It's to the opposite. If we now go to sweet.

I am overdoing it deliberately right now, but it's pulling down the transients, leaving more of the sustain in the room microphone. So let's listen one more time.

Okay. So I'm now leaving it really strongly processed to the left, means the transients have been pulled down. Second, we now go into a send, to a new track.

Let's call this our stereo room.

And on there, I'm now going to add a reverb plugin. So let's stick with a standard stock tool again, let's jump into the presets and let's have a quick look at the rooms that we've got there.

So let's start, let's say with medium dark room first. And one thing we need to remember, when using send routing, the mix factor always needs to be at a hundred. Let's, quickly listen to how that sounds.

Mm, before. After. Okay, so now let's work with that. I would like to bring up the level of the early reflections a little bit. The reverb time can be just a little bit longer, and very importantly, I'm now taking down the level of the reverb tail just a couple of dbs.

And then we take the stereo width of the reverb up a smidge.

Something like 105%. Anything more is often too much, but let's see how that sounds.

So this was before.

After. Okay. I feel like it can use a bit more.

Mm-hmm. Let's check it.

Mono. Okay.

Nothing misbehaves. This simple trick, putting the transients down a bit and then pushing a little bit of extra room on it will give it a stereo width that behaves better in mono, and will also create more depth anyway.

So this is to my ears, a much better workflow than using stereo wideners.

isn't a stereo widening plug in all I need?

No, it isn't!

The more I use them, the less I like them. And it's very rare that I work stereo widening tools into my mixes. And if I do, they usually do very little.

So stereo widening tools is not the answer. They often cause more trouble than good. There are better ways. Okay. Let's move on to the next question.

My room isn't acoustically treated. I mix on headphones. Can I still use the techniques that teach in the workshop?

Absolutely. I'm wearing headphones right now. I often even start my mixes on headphones at home and then take 'em to the studio in a later stage. So in many ways headphones are actually superior when mixing stereo if you know how to do it. There's also a couple of problems, like that they don't cross feed, and that they exaggerate stereo width a little bit.

And that's always a problem because if it shows more stereo than there is, you tend to underdo it. You always get the opposite. But that is something that I wanna dive in much deeper in the workshop. I use headphones. I dial in most of my standard panning and effects in on headphones. I use them a lot.

Although I love my Neumann speakers at the studio, of course. So checking mono compatibility and the stereo width is actually a good thing to do on headphones. And I consult my headphones when I mix on speakers. I use them at times. So, keep doing that. Keep that up. That's a good thing. Cool. Let's move on to the next questions.

Here's another one where somebody's trying to push my buttons. Good on you.

The price is not cheap. Will I get value for my money?

Let me just tell you one thing. I've mixed for 25 years now, and I will squeeze as much information into this workshop as I can possibly fit into the three hours.

And you know what? I'm gonna add even a little bit more, but I will talk to you about this later. And let me just take it one step further.

If you walk out of the workshop feeling like it wasn't worth it and you didn't learn anything new, speak to me. I'm gonna give you your money back.

But I would bet that that's not the case. Everybody, even if you are quite advanced, you will take something valuable out of it and I will do my very best to add as much value as I can. There's more to come on, by the way, on that.

Look, you already get a three hour workshop. And in addition, I already added an extra half an hour one-on-one in the weeks after that. You can schedule with me when it suits you and me. That means you can take what you learned in the workshop, you can take it home, take it with you, work on your mix and bring it back to me so we can then talk about the details.

So that's a really good offer I reckon. I'd love to have you on board. Next question.

I'd love to attend, but I can't come to Mullumbimby that day. Will it run again?

it depends. If there's enough demand, I will definitely do it again. So why don't you let me know.

My email is yarn@mixartist.academy. If you want me to run it again, reach out, or maybe you want this workshop to be an online live session. I've been thinking about this and to spill some beans. I'm already working on the online course version for this course as well.

So there will be other opportunities to uh, learn, my stereo mixing techniques at a later stage.

I will keep you posted. The best thing you can do is subscribe to the Inner Circle on the Mix Artist Academy website, and then you'll get updates as new courses are released.

Another great question.

Is three hours really enough time to master this?

Of course not. Nobody, turns from beginner into masterful in three hours, but that's really not what this workshop is all about.

It is about you taking a lot of great ideas with you, which you then have to take home and apply them and figure out what they're really good for, how you like them, how they resonate with your taste of music. That's really what it's all about.

three hours is gonna be full on in a good way, but also quite tiring.

After three hours, your brains will be stuffed, I promise, and you will probably say, wow, that was enough. So I think three hours is the absolute sweet spot for that. And we'll leave it at three hours. Anything longer, is probably gonna be overwhelming.

Will there be a recording or replay available if I can't stay the whole time or want to review it later?

Um, okay, look, it's a good idea. I haven't really thought about it that much yet, but how about I ask all the participants on the day if they're okay to be recorded. And if they are, it's super easy for me to just switch on the camera and plug it into my laptop and hit record. So that wouldn't be a big deal at all.

But from experience, you have the best time when you're actually there in person rather than rewatching it later.

However, I already have a couple of ideas of how I wanna make the same resources available to the participants of the workshop afterwards.

So let me say, I will find a way for you to go through it in slow motion again, in your own time.

Therefore, yes, if you miss parts of it, it's not the end of the world.

Whatever I'm covering, while you're not there, you can learn in another way.

Can I bring my own project and get feedback on my mix?

Absolutely, yes. This is really what it's all about.

Yes, you can bring your own mix and get feedback and then we also have the one-on-one session afterwards where you and I can dig really deep into your mixing and I can give you pointers and you can try things.

Cool. Alright. I think was a lot today. Let's wrap it up.

Time is running out the workshop. Is this Friday starting at 2:00 PM. Don't be there too late.

Please arrive at quarter to 2:00 PM in the afternoon. It'll run till 5:00 PM.

However, ticket sales already end Thursday, nine o'clock. So that's not much time left.

It's time to act right now. Thursday 9:00 PM is the hard cutoff, so if you wanna do it, get your tickets now.

There are only limited seats. I will hard cap it at 10. At this point we probably will be even fewer, which is great for you. you can Get your tickets, if you simply go to mixartist.academy, it will pop up right there.

There's a button where you can then go straight to purchasing the tickets for this Friday session.

And if you've got any questions, let me know. My email is yarn@mixartist.academy.

Hope to see you on Friday.

Enjoy Mixing Stereo.

Thanks for hanging around. Have a good one everybody.