I was listening to Forever Autumn by Justin Hayward / Jeff Wayne and have always thought what a brilliant stereo track this is.  I see that the guitars are panned wide but the vocal is just somewhere out there in the middle but like back in space somewhere.  Is that just a brilliant reverb or other technique?  Also the synth fills seem to become really big and wondered at the technique.

I find that I get muddy mixes and maybe it is too much modern effects that get stereoed too much whereas older recordings were using more hardware effects on the busses to get that wide effect on a small minority of instruments.

Any ideas?

There's quite a bit of reverb on the vocal. And it's not digital reverb, that's for sure!

Do you use a high pass filter to clean up the mud? 

The keyboards may have been recorded using a technique similar to what Tony Banks did for some of the Genesis keyboard tracks.

He had one side of his stereo tracks run through a slight delay, and according to him it really widened the sound.  I briefly spoke with him about that the one time I ever got to meet him, at a backstage party following a gig at the Greek Theater in CA.  (I got to watch the show from up on the stage, off to one side - what a fantastic experience).

Anyways, that's what he told me he did to widen his keyboard sounds on some of the stuff.  I don't remember anything else technically - it was a quick discussion long long ago and I don't remember anything else off hand.

Bob Bone

Playing a delayed copy of a mono instrument to the other speaker can widen the sound...I forget but there is a maximum delay until the delayed sound is perceived as an echo...

[link=http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep10/articles/pt-0910.htm]http://www.soundonsound.c...0/articles/pt-0910.htm[/link]

You can do this with Channel Tools, yes?

sharke


You can do this with Channel Tools, yes?

 
Indeed the left and right delay times do exactly whats required.

Shambler


Playing a delayed copy of a mono instrument to the other speaker can widen the sound...I forget but there is a maximum delay until the delayed sound is perceived as an echo...

[link=http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep10/articles/pt-0910.htm]http://www.soundonsound.c...0/articles/pt-0910.htm[/link]

I think this value is somewhere around 33ms, before your ear hears echo, instead of the doubling effect.

Yeah, the Haas Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haas_effect

I think if memory serves (and it no longer does), I believe he used a setting of 15 ms.

Bob Bone

I tried this on a stereo synth track that was playing long sustained chords, and I couldn't perceive any difference even with quite a large delay. Does this "widening" effect only work when you hear the note attacks?