Noob mixing question

I've managed to avoid flooding the forum with tons of questions simply by cruising thru the forum at every opportunity to see if a topic has already been brought up and answered. The contributors have done a wonderful job of keeping noobs like me from drowning. I've run into a little problem that I thought I saw in a thread a while ago, but I'll be dipped in that familiar substance if I can find it again...

I got HSH6 last fall, and I've since added Dim Pro and Session Drummer 2 to fill in the instrument/synth selection. I've been trying to bring some life into a pile of old MIDI files that I generated years ago using QuickScore Elite. On one of my projects, I found a need to "widen" the sound of an instrument. I've played endlessly with panning, but it still sounds like a big instrument tucked into a small box, and I'm just moving the box around. Session Drummer has the ability to "widen" a drum kit, I think by spreading out the pan on the individual drums, but it's the only tool that I've got that seems to have that capability. Does Sonar have a function that can widen a voice, or do I have to do it the hard way by making a copy of the track, panning one copy right and one copy left to fill the "stage"? If I have to do that, am I going to run into problems with phase/cancellation?

I bought "The Art of Mixing" by David Gibson. It's an amazing book, and helped a lot trying to mix properly.
It'll probably help you too. And it will also second Fep's advice...