Hello All,
 
While he was working on panoramics, I saw once a producer using a trick to remove few DBs in the center in order to widen the mix and free some room for vocals.
Unfortunately i don't recall at all how he used to do that !
 
Would someone know how to do this using some plugin or some hint ?
 
Thanks in advance.

There's a few ways to do it - if your talking about a stereo mix - such as a "beat" you may have gotten - you can try using Channel Tools in Mid Side mode.   Or any eq that will work in Mid Side mode as well, this way you can eq the center verses the sides.   I do the latter very often in 1 form or another.  Hope this helps!

Thanks for the hint but if i'm not mistaken, the guy didn't used an EQ to do that. He directly removed few DBs in the center of the mix using something on the bus master.
 
What about " Waves center stereo " plugin ?

He may have used a Mid/Side splitter, separating the components that occupy the center from the those that live out on the sides and dropping the levels on the Mid portion. As suggested above, Channel Tools is the tool for that. You could also grab Voxengo's free MSED plugin, which is a little simpler to use.

Thanks very much for your help ;)

This is going to be scoffed at but some time ago I put up a commercial Nashville release on two speakers on the bench. I had to put my head between them to fiddle with the back of the receiver. When I did I noticed I heard kick, snare, bass and vox in the center and everything seemed panned hard left and hard right, and stacked low to high on each side.
 
Ok so I do country and also like so many NORtherners are chasing Nashville sound rainbows, so I tried it and have never gone back.
 
The featured song in my sig (just the latest) is done this way.

That's actually a very old technique, often referred to as "LRC mixing" because every track is either panned 100% to one side or dead center. Proponents say it makes for very clear-sounding mixes. I'd caution that they sound best with your head stuck directly between the speakers.

J-War
Thanks for the hint but if i'm not mistaken, the guy didn't used an EQ to do that. He directly removed few DBs in the center of the mix using something on the bus master.
 
What about " Waves center stereo " plugin ?

I haven't used that Waves plug, but it looks like it would do what you are describing. 
 
HOWEVER, I'd encourage taking a good look at the EQs that can do mid-side because to give the VOX some space in the middle, you may not want to duck ALL frequencies in the middle.  You may just want to duck the spectrum where the VOX lives.
The Cakewalk LP EQ can do this, and the Izotope Ozone stuff for sure.  Probably many others too.
 
My only confusion about these plug-ins that support mid-side is that they don't really give you much (or any) control over where the boundary between mid and side lies.  I think Channel Tools can do that, so I guess you could create two buses and use Channel Tools to separate mid from side, then apply EQ to the mid bus, which I think is what Bitflipper is suggesting.
 
I've never done that so I'd be interested in any comments about how well that works.

bitman:
Interesting.  I'm interested in what you said because I often mix in headphones.
What do you mean by the phrase "stacked low to high on each side"?
 

Another option isn't to lower the center, but raise the sides to create more "space" for whatever is in the center. You can do this with image widening and binaural panning plug-ins (e.g., the Blue Tubes stereo imager). This is effective if the space you need to open up isn't too huge.