Need EQ Panning Technique

Hey,

I've got a song that is a stereo mix only. It contains acoustic guitars which are panned pretty wide left and right. The vocal is in the middle. The guitars are too bright. What would be the best way to apply some EQ to reduce the high frequencies in the far left and right areas of the stereo spectrum without affecting the center too much?

I'm thinking maybe to send the mix to seperate busses which are panned hard left and right and applying EQ on each them panned left and right respectively. Does this make sense?

Maybe I'll just have to experiment some more.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

You can do it all in one plugin using Voxengo's fantastic GEQ (and its also free). http://www.voxengo.com/product/overtonegeq/ Among its many possible routing options there is processing mid and side with separate eq (see the Stereo Sheen preset for example).

Cheers,
Glyn

Thanks guys. I'll try out the Voxengo plugin.

1. Insert the M/S plugin to encode stereo as M/S. This should put the middle in one channel (left or right) and the outside in the other.
2. Insert a stereo EQ and adjust it so it only affects one channel. Play around with it to figure out which channel is Mid and which is Side.
3. Insert the M/S plugin to decode M/S into stereo.

MS decoders work backwards? I thought they just made an M/S signal into 3 channels to make a stereo image. I didn't know you could take a 2 channel stereo signal and make it M/S.

What a great idea for a plugin though. Something that can sepparate a stereo track into sepparate tracks based on Left-Right percentage.

ORIGINAL: rumleymusic
MS decoders work backwards? I thought they just made an M/S signal into 3 channels to make a stereo image. I didn't know you could take a 2 channel stereo signal and make it M/S.

What a great idea for a plugin though. Something that can sepparate a stereo track into sepparate tracks based on Left-Right percentage.

This article talks about it with some detail. http://emusician.com/mag/emusic_front_center/

Technically you could do all the routing yourself in Sonar to separate out the mid and side parts of a stereo recording so having a plugin available to do it for you is just a simplification.

Hmm, by golly it works. Though I did it manually.

Just for fun I'll post the setps for that: (I did this in Audition)

1) Take the original stereo track and create 2 mono tracks, one left and one right
2) Combine the left and the right by panning to the center on both and bouncing to a single mono track. (This becomes the mid)
3) Same as step 2 except this time reverse the polarity on the right channel, again bounce to mono. (This is the Side)
4) Now that you have a Mid and Side you can create the stereo image in the normal way by duplicating the side track, panning one hard left and one hard right and reversing the polarity on the right. (I bounced this to stereo for ease of use, but you can leave it in two tracks if you want to mess with them separately)

Combining the mid and the stereo side, you will have an exact duplicate of the original track (if volume is set at 0dbfs), but now you can adjust the stereo image and work with the center and sides individually.

Thanks altima_boy_2001 for pointing out my ignorance.

This is very cool. I'm gonna try skipping the plug-ins and try the manual method. Seems like an interesting experiment.

Thanks!

ORIGINAL: macflooze

Philip - do this

Take one cardoid mic and one figure 8 mic.
Mount both mics with the capsules as close together as physically possible.
Point the cardoid at the source
Point the fig 8 at 90 degrees away from the source (the PU pattern is facing right and left of the source)
Record each of these to their own separate mono track. You have two mono tracks at this stage, cardoid and fig 8.
The cardoid track is your center mono information.
Clone the fig 8 track, Now you have 2 identical fig 8 tracks - three tracks total.
Reverse the polarity (-180 phase) of the cloned fig 8 track.
Pan the original fig 8 track hard left
Pan the cloned fig 8 track hard right. These 2 tracks are the stereo information.
Group the two fig 8 tracks and play with their level relative to the mono track.

Good Luck
Paul

Thanks Paul for this.

I've been seriously trying to do this verbatim as you've written (repeatedly) and have failed; my AKG side-mic seems set to fig 8, my Pearlman mid-mic to cardiod ... exactly as you have done. I've even applied Sonitus Phase Vst to try to play up some inverse phase portions (with C-S (center-surround) and other combos). I'll try to re-post if anything becomes successful. Perhaps my mic signal is problematic?

Should be useful for me at some point