LOL Philip, I couldn't help but smile while reading some of the stuff you've posted in my regard....I'd hug ya if I saw ya! :) Thanks man. much appreciated.
Well, I think you have the right idea on this stuff. To be honest, as long as something is audible and not phased or "beyond the stereo field" as some of these wideners seem to do, you're right where you need to be. I also like where you're going with the whole dynamics thing, but you also may be over-thinking it a bit. Here's a good scenario for you to think about.
Let's say we have a vocal going on for a verse that has the Sonar vocal strip on it. We add the doubler in that plug to it, but we don't go too crazy and then we add a Sonitus verb or an impulse using a small room verb on it. Just enough to give it some ambience. We add a PSP or Waves S-1 at the end and adjust it to taste.
Now, when the chorus kicks in, you will most likely have some back up vocals going on in there. You have a choice here. You make the lead vocal become an entity with the back up vocals so it it's nice and tight, or you leave the lead vocal a bit out front and have the back ups reinforcing it. Either way will work. But to make each way work correctly, we have to make some changes for impact.
If we will allow the lead vocals to become one with the back ups, it would be a wise decision to run automation on the widener so that the simulation of wideness on the lead vocal does not walk into the field of the back ups. So we should shrink the size of the lead vocal a bit in the chorus part. This way, the lead vocal will sit in its perch and the back ups will fill in the space in between forming an entity.
Now let's try this using the other method I talked about. We now want the lead vocals to stick out a bit more and have the back ups reinforce here. Let's say for our back up vocals, we will record each high, mid and low 3 times a piece. The trick here though, is to only record the part that falls on the lead vocal harmony, 2 times and allow the lead vocal to be the 3rd time. This way we don't over-power the vocal harmony with "the melody".
So we record high, mid and low...these will be the left side harmonies. We then record high, mid and low for the right side. We'll then record high and low only...these will be the centered back ups that will be with the lead vocal as the "mid".
Ok, from here we send the left and right vocals to a bus if we want to, or we process the them on their track effects bins and freeze if need be. I still like to send them to a bus though so we can then process the whole lot as an entity, but if you choose not to, that's ok too.
Next we work with what will be our centered vocals. We want the lead vocal "middle" part to stand out a bit. So what we will do here is (keep in mind, we are still processing this vocal like I mentioned with the Vocal Strip enhancements) add a delay to the lead vocal. This delay will be in time with the bpm of the song. Let's say the song is at 120 bpm. We want this delay to be a longer delay because we want to enhance some delay tails on the chorus to make it appear that we are holding out notes a bit longer than we really are. We will only fly the delay in on tails via automation. We want a 500ms delay tail on the left. We don't want a ping pong, but we want a slight spread on this delay because the widener is going to enhance it further outwards and give some impact to those delay tails. So we set the right side at 510 or 512 maybe 515. The reason being, it will just spread things enough yet will not bring on the ping pong thing.
Now we mix in the centered high and low back ups and get a good mix. Once we add in the others we did along with these, you'll hear the lead vocal out front, but the supporting vocals will be right there enhancing about 50% of the pan field. The delay tails we created will stretch out just passed the back up vocals as long as we keep those back ups that are panned left/right to about 40%. The tails of that delay will make a nice impact on the chorus parts and the lead vocal will still have a nice, thick sound that is slightly wider than the center where it is actually panned.
This method also works well if we send the back up vocals to a bus like I had mentioned, and then throw on the Vocal Strip using the doubler....compress the bus, eq it, and then use something like Clone Ensemble or Crowd Chamber with another stereo widener at the end of the chain there. The cool thing there is we will have processed wider vocals left/right and our down the middle back ups along with the lead vocal keeping the center field in tact. The high and low on the center pan field will be much lower in level because we just want a little something there. We don't want them to be dominant. You could also process them exactly like the lead vocal minus the delay or even add the delay for fun or effect "stand-out" purposes. There are no rules really.
But stuff like this is really going to make an incredible difference. The thing to keep in mind here with any widener is, it is always best to use a widener that allows for frequency control. That's what I like about the PSP, Q-Tools and the Waves Matrix. They give you frequency control over how the wideness processes instead of just dropping something on like the Sonitus Phase. The more control we have with things like this, the better off we are.
If I've lost you (or anyone else) on this stuff, please feel free to ask me and I'll do my best to help you out. :)
rockinrobby: I'd love to show some in depth examples of the stuff I talk about. Unfortunately, it's a little time consuming which is why part of my business is creating in depth recording videos on stuff like this. You see how much I type covering some of this stuff...when I do a video, I'm talking while showing it all. I show how to create/execute a technique in full, explain it, and then you see how it works with video in real time. I even mix people's songs for them via video from the ground up showing what, where and why something is what it is as well as all the problem areas in between. I take the teaching thing VERY serious and most times a video for mixing an entire song is 10 or more 30 minute long videos as I cover each instrument from the ground up. It's a pretty intense learning experience and thankfully I've done quite well with it. I used to create vids of this nature and give them out for free and had some on Youtube, but I felt it was best to remove them because, well, when you have a business, time is money and creating things of this nature can be extremely time consuming cutting into time that could be spent on client work. Not to mention, the video rendering takes nearly double the amount of time (for high resolution) it takes to create the thing and you lose a machine during rendering due to the power needed to render. Until technology can come up with a faster way to render vids, I'm stuck talking about techniques unless someone contacts me for a lesson. LOL! :)
post edited by Danny Danzi - 2011/06/06 13:33:08