Stereo Width (Panning, Reverb, Delay, Chorus, and Flangers) and Distortion

Imagine you’re at a rock concert. The sound feels huge. The stage itself is large. There are echoes and reverberations throughout the theater. It’s an impressive experience. When mixing music for production, we want to recreate that feeling. How can we make our music sound huge when the listener is listening to it in a small environment? If the audience is listening with headphones, the actual space that sound can bounce off is tiny. What we have to do is trick our ears into thinking the sound is in a space much larger than it is.

Stereo width describes the perceived width of a sound. By increasing the stereo width, your sound gains the impression of being in a larger space. This can be done with several tools, which we will explore in this chapter. We will discuss the tools in isolation, but you can and should consider layering these tools on top of each other to increase the stereo width...

Panning audio

The simplest tool to increase stereo width is a technique called panning. Before we can explain panning, we need to understand what mono and stereo mean.

Monophonic sound (known as mono) is the term used when different audio channels play the same sound equally. Regardless of whether you are listening out of your right or left speaker/headphone, the audio is identical. Mono is used for radio talk shows and telephone calls.

When identical audio is played out of two audio speakers, as with mono, your ears perceive the sound as originating from a location in the middle of the two sources. This is known as a phantom center.

Stereophonic sound (known as stereo) means you have different sounds coming out of each audio channel. If your left speaker/headphone has a different sound coming out of it from the right, your sound is said to be in stereo. The benefit of stereo sounds is that it creates the illusion of audio coming from multiple directions just like in real...

Using reverb

Natural reverb occurs when sound waves bounce off a surface and reflect back at a listener. The timing and amplitude of the reflected audio exhibit some variation compared to the original. Over time, the amplitudes and frequencies in the sound wave decrease and the sound dissipates.

You can think of reverb as making your sound feel further away. The more reverb you add, the further away your sound will feel and the larger the space the sound will appear to exist in. Reverb is actually a separate sound that is played (you can play just the reverb of a sound without hearing the original source), but our ears get tricked and interpret the original and the reverb as if they are connected as a single sound.

In general, reverb is the last effect you want to apply in the signal chain to your sound.

There are two kinds of reverb: algorithmic digital reverb and convolution reverb. Let’s take a look at each of these.

Applying digital reverb with Fruity Reeverb...

Using LuxeVerb

Luxeverb is a cutting-edge reverb plugin that comes with FL Studio All Plugins Edition. Luxeverb is a reverb plugin with tons of features and controls. One distinguishing feature that sets Luxeverb apart from most reverb plugins on the market is that you have the ability to adjust the pitch and dynamics of the reverb. Let’s take a look at the features offered by Luxeverb:

Figure 7.5 – Luxeverb

As always, on the top right, you’ll find a list of presets to explore.

By default, Luxeverb is split into a top blue reverb control section and a bottom envelope control black section. You can choose to hide the envelope section by clicking the bottom edges and dragging upward.

Let’s take a look at each section, starting with the INPUT and REVERB sections.

Figure 7.6 – Luxeverb INPUT and REVERB panels

Here’s a description of the controls.

The INPUT panel:

• WET GAIN: Controls how much input...

Using delay effects

A delay is the repeat of a sound played back after a few milliseconds. That’s it, pretty simple, right? With a delay plugin, you can control how long to wait before hearing the echo. It can be synced with the tempo of your project.

The following terminologies are used to describe certain types of delays:

• Straight delay: Delaying the original material.
• Slapback delay: Delay times of between 70 ms and 120 ms. Generally, this complements dry sounds.
• Doubling delay: Delay times of between 20 ms and 50 ms. It creates an artificial doubling of the track.
• Ping-pong delay: Creates a call-and-response reaction between the repeats of the delay. For example, the initial call is 300 ms and the follow-up call is 600 ms.
• Stereo-widening delay: Short delays of around 10 ms. Sounds like the original sound to the listener, but spreads out more in the stereo field.

Applying delay effects with Fruity Delay 3

Fruity Delay...

Using chorus effects

In Chapter 5, Sound Design and Audio Envelopes, we discussed phase cancellation and interference. This is where multiple waveforms interact with each other and cause the sound to become louder or quieter. In-phase audio makes the sound louder while being out of phase causes the sound to become quieter. These are the two extreme phase possibilities, but there is a range between them. Plugins that play with the sound phase include chorus plugins, flangers, and phasers. We will discuss each of these over the next few pages.

Chorus plugins play with the signal phase. A chorus plugin creates duplicates of the audio signal, using the same phase position, amplitude, and frequency. The copied signal is delayed to create a difference in phase. With this delayed sound, we can adjust a bunch of properties such as the timing or pitch. There is a control included called the Low-Frequency Oscillator (LFO), which controls the delay timing.

Using Fruity Chorus

Let...

Using Vintage Chorus

FL Studio Signature Edition has a chorus effect plugin called Vintage Chorus. Let’s discuss the Vintage Chorus effect plugin.

Vintage Chorus is a chorus effect plugin that emulates the Roland Juno 6’s Bucket Brigade Delay (BBD) Chorus effect:

1. Load up a sample or an instrument with notes and route it to a new mixer track.
2. Add the Vintage Chorus effect. When you play your instrument, you will be able to hear a chorus effect:

Figure 7.13 – Vintage Chorus

As usual, there is a list of presets in the top-right corner of the plugin to get you started.

Let’s take a look at the components of Vintage Chorus.

Figure 7.14 – MODE

In Vintage Chorus, there are three modes to choose from. These modes are various chorus effects that can be applied. By default, MODE 1 is selected.

MODE 1 creates the Juno 6 Chorus I effect. MODE 2 creates the Juno 6 Chorus II effect. You can apply both...

Using flanger effects

Flanger effects are similar to chorus effects and create a copy of the original sound, adjusting the delay times. The copied sound is delayed usually between 5 and 25 ms. A low-frequency modulator is applied to the delay time to oscillate between shorter and longer delay times. Since the waveforms are the same, wave interference occurs as discussed in Chapter 5, Sound Design and Audio Envelopes. At certain interfering frequencies, resonances are created. You can think of resonance as an intense tone made more pronounced than other frequencies. The low-frequency oscillator moves around the waveform to find different resonances. We call this sweeping resonance sound a flanger. Flangers take advantage of the feedback to resend the output sound back into itself and create additional resonance.

As a general guideline, consider applying flanger effects to hi-hats, guitars, and pads. These often complement the sound of the instrument. When mixing, you want to place...

Using phaser effects

Phasers sound similar to chorus and flanger effects and are used in almost the same way. In phasers, a copy of the original sound is moved in and out of phase with the original. The focus of a phaser is to sweep frequencies across the spectrum.

When mixing, you want to place phaser effects before your delay and reverb effects in the signal chain.

Let’s apply a phaser effect to an instrument:

1. Load up a sample or an instrument with notes and route it to a new mixer track.
2. Add the Fruity Phaser effect. When you play your instrument, you will be able to hear a phaser effect:

Figure 7.19 – Fruity Phaser

3. To hear examples of phaser effects, left-click on the default presets in the top right of the plugin.

The following is a description of the Fruity Phaser plugin controls:

• SWEEP FREQ. (short for frequency) sets the frequency of the low-frequency modulator.
• MIN DEPTH and MAX DEPTH...

Using Vintage Phaser

FL Studio Signature Edition comes with a phaser plugin called Vintage Phaser. It’s modeled after the Electro-Harmonix Small Stone Phase Shifter guitar pedal.

Let’s explore Vintage Phaser and add a phaser effect to an instrument:

1. Load up a sample or an instrument with notes and route it to a new mixer track.
2. Add the Fruity Phaser effect. When you play your instrument, you will be able to hear a phaser effect:

Figure 7.20 – Vintage Phaser

The following is a description of the controls. The layout is very similar to the layout of the FL Studio plugin Vintage Chorus.

The PHASING panel lets you change the modulation range.

Figure 7.21 – Vintage Phaser PHASING panel

• MIN: Lets you set the minimum frequency for the oscillator.
• MAX: Lets you set the maximum frequency for the oscillator.
• HQ: Allows oversampling. Oversampling is when the plugin converts the audio into a...

Understanding distortion effects

Distortion is an audio effect created by overloading audio. It changes the waveform and compresses sound in a way often described as “warm or dirty” sounding.

There are several types of distortion:

• CLIPPING occurs when your audio is louder than the sound system can handle. Unintended clipping is an unpleasant sound to the ear. You’ve heard clipping whenever you hear audio feedback from phone or video calls. This type of audio can occur when the audio gain is turned above 0 dB. Unintended clipping distortion is undesirable; however, there are many kinds of desirable distortion that can be used in creative effects for your music to add unique character to your sounds. For the purposes of this chapter, we will be talking about intended distortion being used as a creative effect, rather than unintended clipping distortion.
• SATURATION adds harmonic frequencies to your sound. It adds some compression and smooths...

Understanding mix buses

When you have two or more mixer channels routed into a single mixer channel, we call the combined audio a bus, also known as a mix bus. Buses are useful for combining sounds together and making them appear related to one another.

The master channel is a type of bus that collects audio from all the other mixer channels. Most of the time, when we talk about a bus, we aren’t referring to the master channel, though.

You can generally think of a bus as a checkpoint along the way to the master channel. Does the audio coming out of the bus sound good so far up to this point? In most songs, you will have a bus for your drums, a bus combining the layering of your instruments, and a bus for your vocals.

Let’s set up a mix bus in our mixer:

1. Load up two instruments in the channel rack, add some notes, and copy those notes to both instruments.
2. Route both instruments to separate new mixer channels.
3. In the mixer, select both...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to make your sounds feel large and trick your ears into thinking your digital instruments were played in actual physical environments. This will make your sounds feel natural and more enjoyable to listen to.

We discussed stereo width and the effects you can use to make your sounds feel larger. We explored tools used to manipulate stereo width, including panning, digital reverb, convolution reverb, delay effects, chorus effects, flangers, and phasers. We also discussed distortion effects. Finally, we discussed how to use mix buses to combine your instruments to make them more cohesive and appear related to one another.

In the next chapter, we’ll jump into recording live audio and the vocal processing best practices.