FL STUDIO | Mixing Basics - Stereo Field

[Music] welcome in this series we'll introduce you to basic mixing terms and techniques to set you on the right track for your future music production we'll show you how we went from this to this [Music] check the video info for an index if you want to skip parts this time we'll talk about the stereo field how it works why it's needed and a few basic techniques to remember our ability to locate sounds in a 360 degree space around us stems from two main factors one the volume and delay of an identical sound arriving at each ear and two the frequency content of the sound this is what all these folds in your ear pinna are for differentially reflecting high versus low frequencies when we listen to music from a pair of speakers or headphones we perceive the stereo information as location direction and positions of sounds in the virtual soundscape just like it's a real space we refer to this as the stereo field the stereo field is the sum of all decisions made in a mix that result in differences between the left and right channels it's what we refer to when talking about the width of a mix does the sound seem to come from directly in front of you or as it's surrounding you this spatial positioning is a very powerful mixing tool because just like with vision when you pile a bunch of letters in the same space it makes it very hard to distinguish what's there audio is the same just the spacing those letters out makes it easier to pay attention to each one individually with sound panning them around the stereo field will do the same here's an audio example [Music] with all the joy that we've got in if you were wearing headphones or listening on stereo speakers you will find that in the second example it's much easier to distinguish each individual sound we can use this in a mix to reduce audio confusion we can visualize the stereo field with an analyzer called a vector scope this is basically an addition of two level meters represented in a two-dimensional plane the two axes intersecting at a 90 degree angle in the middle are left and right the center axis represents the center or the mid channel if a signal is the same on left and right channels we will see only the center line show level if it's only in the left channel we will see activity there and the same is true for the right channel however when we combine all three channels we get a sort of cloudy looking image this cloud of values represents the difference between left and right channels or the side channel if a signal is the same on left and right but left and right channels are 180 degrees out of phase the graph shows a horizontal line this may make headphone users dizzy [Music] this happens when you have only side signal meaning left and right are maximally different if any significant element in your mix looks a lot like this on the vector scope you know it's time to make some changes but why many listening environments will not provide perfect stereo separation for example a phone or a laptop while manufacturers may claim that there are stereo speakers inside due to the small form factor of the device it is physically impossible to achieve near perfect stereo separation like for example in headphones the speakers are physically so close together that by the time the sound gets to your ears it will have mostly combined to mono and when combined or summed to mono signals that are 180 degrees out of phase on the left and right channel will cancel out to produce silence and you wouldn't want that unless you're pioneering the genre of inaudible music of course instead of looking at a stereo signal as left and right channels we can view it as a mid side signal where mid is the sum of left and right channels divided by two that means everything that is the same on the left and right channel also known as the mono sum and side is the difference of left and right divided by two this makes sense for certain applications like mid side eq which we'll touch on later in the video and stereo spreading when a signal is split into mid and side channels you can easily increase or decrease the stereo width by inversely applying gain to the mid and side channels make the mid channel louder and the side channel quieter and you will get a less stereo result and vice versa because we touched on it earlier let's look more closely at the information our brain uses to determine where something is located in a mix first there is the obvious answer sounds coming from the left side in real life will be louder in your left ear simply because your head blocks some of the sound so level differences between the channels can emulate this real-life phenomenon in the audio world we call this process panning in the early days mixing consoles had panning switches instead of continuously adjustable panning a signal could be panned left center or right this is why on a lot of older recordings that came out when stereo was a new technology drums are entirely on the left channel for example today we luckily have panning knobs that allow the differences in level from left to right to be fine-tuned secondly however there's a time component to stereo localization just the same as a real world sound coming from the left side hits your left ear with more power it also hits your left ear before it hits your idea this difference depends on the size of your head and the speed of sound naturally that is a lot of factors to consider when you're going for audio realism but for music we can luckily simplify it a little if we assume a sound is 100 directional and going into the left ear at a 90 degree angle to the ear and travel straight through your head which low frequencies actually do as the average distance between human eardrums is roughly 14 centimeters we arrive at the real world maximum average time between hitting the left ear and the right ear of roughly 0.4 milliseconds or 400 microseconds not a lot of time however even though you may never encounter a left right delay that short in music production our brains will still interpret a sound that is delayed between the left and right ear as one sound with spatial localization unless the delay is longer than 5 milliseconds for short sounds and 35 milliseconds for sustained sounds that's where it'll break down to the perception of an echo rather than direction since this time interval is so short it often happens within a single vibration or wave cycle of a sound so the sound is at a different phase in the left ear than it is in the right ear this is why we call these small differences phase differences phase correlation is another way of measuring the stereo width of a signal it's basically like reducing the vector scope to a one-dimensional object a meter that can go up or down with only side signal this meter will show -1 because left and right are out of phase with only mid signal this meter will show plus one the phases are the same on the left and right a lot of pop music stays closer to plus one than to zero on meters like this meaning there is a solid center channel or it's what we call mono compatible but there is also some stereo information especially if you're making any kind of dance music that is supposed to work on club systems and car stereos it is highly recommended that you make your main lower frequencies mono a lot of venues and speaker systems will have a single channel for the sub bass or indeed only one subwoofer so below a certain frequency the sound will be summed to mono in the hardware if you have a lot of stereo sub bass or bass information this can potentially lead to great disappointment because your heavy drop in your new banger sounds lovely on headphones but in the car or in the club the sub bass cancels out or produces inconsistencies and therefore fails to deliver in the low end the easiest way to make sure that's not the case is to use mid-side eq like this patcher preset here and then put a high pass filter on the side channel if your bass begins to warble or sound weak after you've done that you know there's a problem at the source i'll play this in stereo and then in mono so you can hear the difference and then we'll add mid side eq [Music] [Music] panning law decides how the panning functions in fl studio apply level differences to the left and right channels triangular will result in a -3 decibel reduction in level at the center pan point there is no interpolation the gain isn't boosted or attenuated in any other way if we paint this response onto a vector scope we will get a triangle this means the harder the signal is panned the louder it will be when summed to mono circular instead reduces hard left and hard right by -3 decibels and interpolates the gain change smoothly if we draw this response onto the vectorscope we get you guessed it a quarter of a circle since every point on a circle is the same distance from the center every possible panning position will reduce the level gradually so it is equal in level when sum to mono that makes it much more intuitive to use and it's why we call this one equal power penning this is the default panning law in fl studio stereo adjustments can make a busy mix feel like it has more space it is easier to distinguish between two elements that are panned opposite to each other than two that are both panned to the center the most obvious control to achieve a wider mix is the panning it allows positioning signals from hard left to hard right i like to pan drums from the drummer's perspective but with the center axis of the drum kit going through kick and snare this results in the hi-hats going on the left slightly and the crash going to the right lead instruments like vocals lead guitars and synths are important and therefore should be in the center of the mix because you should clearly hear them no matter where you are in the room so we won't change the claviness panning we will however pan the brass and the single note guitar slightly opposite each other to increase separation [Music] to further widen the stereo image you can use chorus effects on sounds that are suited for it for example sounds that play chords or have a tonal characteristic that works with what a chorus does like organs and guitars a chorus plays multiple copies of a sound pans and delays them and then slowly modulates their playback speed making it sound like there is more of the sound than there actually is increase the feedback and modulation speed and lower the delay time and you will get a flanger-like sound we'll put a fruity flanges on the clavinet here [Music] a similar effect can be achieved if you're using synthesizers by using unison this is analogous to chorus as it also plays multiple copies of the sound but with different parameter settings like pitch and panning for each additional copy resulting in a wider source sound you can use the stereo spread control on mixer tracks to apply a general mid side balance to your audio turn it to the left to widen turn it to the right to merge to mono fl studio comes with two gain plugins equipped for widening or narrowing the existing stereo information in a sound fruity stereo enhancer and fruity stereo shaper fruity stereo shaper can do a lot of things panning stereo widening delaying left or right channels and also introducing a frequency dependent phase shift in the left or right channel most importantly however it comes with very handy presets that make it invaluable in an environment like patcher it can for example put out the left and right channels separately or use either side as mono or split a signal into its mid-inside components so they can be processed differently i'll set it up to give me independent left and right channels here and i'll create width by individually equalizing left and right [Music] fruity stereo enhancer is a more user-friendly but also lightweight version of the stereo shaper where a lot of the things the stereo shaper can do have dedicated controls there is a stereo separation knob which works like the one in the mixer a phase offset between the left and right channel a switch to invert the polarity of either channel and panning and volume controls on the output use this plugin for broad strokes adjustments to the stereo position of a sound inside an effects chain i'll use it to widen the brass before the compression here and undo the panning i did earlier [Music] finally haas effect is a way to artificially create the time component of stereo localization we mentioned earlier it's a delay between the left and right channels making the sound come out of one speaker before it comes out of the other since this effect is the least mono-compatible one of all the ones we've mentioned we've left it for last to make a haar's effect i'll add a fruity stereo shaper to my hi-hats and tambourines and use the delay knob to dial in a little bit of artificial face delay adding to the panning i've already done [Music] after applying all of these concepts to every track let's compare what we had before with where we are now the track is now moderately wider and even though the change is subtle it makes a big difference in how balanced and interesting the whole mix sounds and that's it for this video we hope this one gives you the tools to position your sounds in the stereo field and increase the inherent production value factor of your mixes remember to check the video information for any manual or video links and the example projects used in this video

Channel: FL STUDIO by Image-Line Software

Views: 40,383

Rating: 4.9763098 out of 5

Keywords: FL Studio, Image-Line Software, Image Line, Fruity Loops, DAW, flstudio, official, tutorial, Making Trap Music, Music Software, Music Production, Mixing Music, Beats

Id: UWW-ppRjmCQ

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021