FastBikerBoy


Sonitus phase will also do a mighty fine job of widening a mix.

+1! Simple to use and effective.
 
-Danny

bitflipper


Any kind of M/S-capable effect has the potential for enhancing width. Unfortunately, Channel Tools is the only bundled plugin that does. If you are open to third-party tools and have a few bucks to spend, look at FabFilter Pro-C and Pro-Q, both of which are very useful for widening. The perception of width comes down to left-right differences, so all width enhancing entails exaggerating or creating differences between the left and right channels. We are most perceptive to differences in the high frequencies (frequencies with wavelengths longer than the distance between our ears). The simplest trick is boosting high frequencies with an equalizer that allows separate processing of the Side component. Unlinking your limiter will also help, if your limiter offers that capability. Any compressor, limiter or EQ can be made into a M/S processor with a little work. Run a track to two busses, each with an instances of Channel Tools. Turn the Mid component all the way down on one bus and the Side component all the way down on the other bus. Now you have separate Mid and Side components that you can treat any way you like. Try putting reverb on the Side component only, for example.

Bitflipper I got to say that this is brilliant! I have used Channel Tools but I find Ozone to be better in this area. First there is a built in widening meter that is helpful, and second you can widen by a particular band. This means you can leave the bass centered and widen just the higher frequencies. Which IMHO sounds great.


I did not think of this solution using channel tools. It is a bit more work but you can probably achieve similar results using the way you just described. That is a great tip 

The new waves silver offer has the S1 Stereo Enhancer. (Can we mention that now that Cake has offered it to us? Yea I think so.)

Guitarhacker


By widening just one instrument that is in the entire song.... like the acoustic might be, you get the widening on that instrument without blurring the rest of the mix. The one instrument widened tricks the brain into hearing the entire mix as wider, and you still have good definition in the rest of the mix. 

my 2 cents.

Listen to these words of wisdom.

What I find interesting is that people are too quick in terms of slamming your entire mix through some arbitrary effect like a widener. I take the Hi Fi approach. Would you really want to do that? Although you may gain something in terms of widening you will loose something else in the process. (I can guarantee it. If you did a controlled A/B test with and without the effect over a mono speaker I bet you will pick the version without the widener as nicer)  

Do your research and really find out what a widener is doing. You may be surprised. (they distort phase and time on purpose and mess with EQ. Do you want to run your mix through that!) If you have got a stuff on your masterbuss then maybe you should take it all off and see if you can create the same vibe back at track and buss level. Leave your masterbuss alone. (gentle two buss compression is a slightly different thing and I don't have a problem with that) 
It is poor man's way of saying Oh my mix is not wide enough so now I need to widen it. Go back to your mixing and do the widening back at mix level. Also what Herb is saying is also very true. It might only be one or two things in your whole mix that need widening. Find them and do it there. Leave everything else alone.

A mix is a much more complex signal than a track or a buss. Any effect might be good at track level but may not do so well on a very complex signal. Converting stereo to M/S and altering the M/S balance is OK (and probably the best option, Channel Tools sounds OK as well) but you can also do the same thing in your mix too.

This advice is also applying to mixes that you are creating yourself not the OP that did transfer an older mix from a cassette and wanted to widen it. OK you might be able to do something with a widener over that and of course that is your only option as you do not have the original mix to work with. But for those of us that do have control over the mixing phase all I am saying is do more at mix level and less at masterbuss level and you will be rewarded with a better sound in the long run.

Good food for thought Jeff, although I gotta say I'm tempted to widen a mix after I complete it as well. Having the "music jumps out in front of the speakers" effect is really tempting to use. It's one of the few ways I've been able to achieve a type of 3Dish sound when I mix. Even reverbs can sound flat at times. However it is really easy to overdo widening, especially when you first start using that type of plugin. I'll have to try just widening one instrument and see how that comes out. I just tried Danny's tip of unwidening a reverb on the drums to bring things into focus and unclutter a mix a little more. That worked really really well.

These are great suggestions. I'm dealing with old board tapes of a local band that are in mono and I wanted to give them a little more life. Sadly I have no control over the finished mix on the tape. So far channel tools has helped. It's a great plug-in that I've never really used before despite having it since SONAR 8.

Pan  

  There’s also the Open Ambience Project’s SHEPPi freebie. Works also for narrowing the stereo field. Instead of using a spatial enhancer (or whatever) for the whole mix, you might try to use one only for your reverb bus return. When you have the original multitrack recording, that is. Haven’t tried that trick for a mono/stereo recording, but that might work, too: keep the straight signal as it is, add a reverb send with a spatial enhancer, mix to taste.