3 techniques for STEREO sound

hi everyone i'm oscar from underdog and today i want to give you a mixing tutorial where we're going to look at three ways to make your sound stereo let's get into it all right number one way panning you're probably aware of this one so panning takes a stereo signal right and it'll balance the left and the right channels differently to each other so if you pan the knob all the way to the left it's going to make the stair the left stereo channel the loudest and if you pan all the way to the right it's going to make the right stereo channel the loudest right you see these panels everywhere you see them on mixing consoles like this in ableton you see it right on in your session view underneath like right next to the the fader this is fine this is great you can play something a little bit to the left a little bit to the right but once you start reaching the extremes of your 180 degrees sound stage what happens is you will hear the signal completely in your left ear now what happens then does not make sense to our human brain because imagine that there is an ambulance driving past you on the left you're not just going to hear that only in your left ear you're going to hear that in both ears but you're still going to be very aware of it coming from the left so today we're going to look at panning and two other ways at which you can place your sound in the stereo spectrum so let's get into it so here we are in ableton completely empty set and what i want to show you is just this effect on very basic sounds so a sound that i like to demonstrate stereo on is the 808 rim shot it's this one this one because it's nice and simple and mid-rangey and it comes from the perfect center so let's program a simple little pattern here 3 16th notes always a golden one there we go okay so this is coming from dead center now technique number one panning in ableton session view this button here is the pan pods this pan pot you can move it to the left to hear your sound completely to the left you can move it to the right and as you can see only the right channel here is making sound so if you're wearing headphones right now it's very clearly coming just from the left ear there's nothing in your right ear vice versa right now there's only info on your right ear nothing in your left ear feels a bit weird that silence is quite unnatural that you're hearing in the other ear if you listen to this on speakers however even if you've panned it completely to the left the left speaker's sound still reaches your right ear so it's less problematic on speakers so this is something to pay attention to when you want something to be in full focus and to demand the attention of the listener you usually want it to live in the center of your sound stage it can be that can mean it can be either be a mono sound or it can be a very wide sound that still sits in the center okay if you want to de-prioritize things you can pan them a little bit to the sides but if you start panning things to the extremes they might draw quite a lot of attention to themselves because the mind's eye is pulled away from the center into one of the ears so just be careful with that this is one of the reasons why in my own mixes i actually rarely pan in this way maybe a little bit just to pull things a little bit out of the center but rarely very far now let's look at two other ways to pan things in an interesting way well the first one that i want to show you is the eq8 eq8 is an equalizer which affects the frequencies that you can hear right so in the typical usage you would just boost a couple of frequencies or cut a couple of frequencies in this manner right so let's just show what that sounds like boosting that high click boosting the low click cutting the low click cutting the high click or even doing something like a low pass filter okay this is the typical use of the eq8 now the eq8 in ableton has a few other modes and there's particularly the left right mode and the mid side mode now the mid side mode i won't talk about it right now but it's a very powerful mode the most interesting mode right now is the left right mode so what we do with the left right mode once we set it to this this little button here appears and we can select either the left channel or the right channel the left channel here has no filters on it the right channel has four default ones so i'm just going to remove them and just take one so what i can do is i can boost some frequencies just in the right even boost it quite widely and on the left i can cut the same frequencies suddenly shifting that sound to the right i might just quickly put a little limiter on there so it doesn't end up clipping on the way out so this little equalizer here we've put it to left right mode and the left and the right we've given them inverted shapes and so we've panned it slightly to the right and if you take it away it's back in the center and now it's slightly to the right and imagine we had a second element like let's put this this one exactly on the oh on the rim shots so that when we click on the rim shot in the drum rack this effect is now only affecting the rim shot imagine we're going to add another element and we're going to also add another eq8 to it so let's say the mid tom that mid tom what we're going to do is we're going to pan it to the left by simply inverting the scale this scale here starts at 100 percent and you can set it down to zero percent where it doesn't affect anything and then you can set it to minus 100 which literally just changes the direction of um of the way it's programmed so let's program a little sound in there mid tom this one [Music] so the mid tom is now panned slightly to the left we can exaggerate this there we go so now we've created a little bit of stereo separation without simply panning things in fact when you have some special effects like a stereo imager there's some things like the ozone stereo imager etc what they'll often do is they will they will just make a sound stereo by creating a curve that's kind of like kind of like this in a very sort of small granular way in much smaller curves than i'm doing here it'll just create sort of inverted inverted eq curves panning some left or some right some left some right but on on in global you still kind of feel like the sound then comes from the center even though it's made it sound more wide so this is the eq way of panning of placing a sound in the stereo field now let's look at method number three which is also my favorite method which is called the haas effect and it's a psychoacoustic phenomenon where we place a sound in the stereo spectrum based on the delay between when the sound hits our left and our right ear so that ambulance that i was talking about in the introduction that ambulance is driving past you on the left and that siren is wailing really loud and it hits your left ear and then it takes a fraction of a moment longer to hit your right ear because it has to bounce off some walls or whatever and those like 10 milliseconds that it takes to hit your right ear are enough for your brain to say whoop it's on the left or whoop it's on the right if it's the other way around so we can we can simulate this in ableton by duplicating a channel and delaying one of those signals by like 10 milliseconds something like this and then panning one left and one right so let me show you on a new on a new one how to how that would sound let's do something on the 707 just to spice it up a little bit yeah that rim shot let's do that all right uh let's do there we go [Music] okay so this one we're going to apply the de haas effect to it so right now it's fully mono as you can see both channels are equally allowed so the the cleanest way to show you this might be to do it like this and say channel l duplicate it and say channel r and this channel i'm going to pan completely to the left and this one i'm going to pan completely to the right so together they sound like a mono channel but right what we're going to do now is we're going to delay one of them by about 10 milliseconds so let's delay the right channel by about 10 milliseconds and we can do this with ableton's delay regular delay there we go so we turn off the sync mode so we're working in milliseconds turn down the feedback because we don't really want it to like echo make it 100 wet okay and now so what we've got now is a whole signal that is quite simply delayed by one millisecond it sounds almost identical but once we bring it up to about five to ten milliseconds see what happens i really think you should listen to this on headphones to really appreciate the difference here so mono in the center on the left you hear that even though the left and the right channels are equally loud have the same eq content they're all they're completely identical except for when they hit your ear and because there's a slight delay before it hits your right ear your brain says okay the sound is on the left side once you go too far it becomes weird like a kind of a ping-pong delay like it become two separate sound events in your mind so you want to keep these delays pretty short and in case you don't want to make two channels to do this one other way of doing this is if you make it um if you put it in the center like this to do this you can make you can group this delay unit create two different effect chains call one the the dry and the other one the delayed and then pan one completely to one side and one completely to the other side this thing is a little pan control and so the right side here is delayed the left side is completely dry there's nothing affecting it and so you'll get the same effect let's see switch it around now comes from the right all right that was it for me today that was just three ways to place your sound in the stereo spectrum there's a few more but those will already get you very far to make good mixing decisions okay subscribe to the channel if you're enjoying the content hope this was helpful and uh take care okay bye bye would you like to try making electronic music that's what we do at underdog electronic music school based in brussels we offer a program called the boot camp program which is designed for absolute beginners who want to start having fun making their own music but who don't have experience yet doing that we run online classrooms in small groups where you and a real teacher go through 12 classes where you see from a to z how to make electronic music and how to start having fun you can ask any questions at any moment and you can also focus on the genres and artists that you love so that you can start making the music that you are passionate about check out the details on www.underdog and get in touch for a test session or to sign up for one of the classes so until we hear from you see you online you

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 2,774

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Keywords: Stereo sound, Ableton live, Panning, Stereo widening, haas effect, haas, EQ8, tutorial, sound engineering, music production, wide sound, how to make sound wide, wider sound, left/right EQ, Ableton, electronic music, 808, 909, rimshot, music theory, audio engineering, audio, stereo audio, pan pot, equalizer, stock plugins, sound design

Id: dW6Wgo6ivpg

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020