Enhance Stereo Field ?

leland_iko_music · Post by **leland_iko_music** » Sun Sep 24, 2023 8:57 pm

Hi All,

I've managed to remove the default reverb in the PA5X since I use external reverb off of my mixer (Alexis MIDIverb4), and some sounds I really want to be totally dry (like some drum or bass sounds), but I'm missing a lot of wide-stereo-field in a lot of the sounds on the PA5X. There are a lot of sounds that pan through the stereo field, but they're nowhere near as wide as I would like them to be. Is there something to enhance the stereo effect on these sounds?

Curious minds ...

Thanks

L.

QuiRobinez · Post by **QuiRobinez** » Sun Sep 24, 2023 9:24 pm

there are a lot of sound design techniques which you can use to achieve sound widening. Most of them are using a mid side technique, but this isn't avaliable in the plugins on keyboards, but there are other tricks you can use to achieve the same. Most of them is on micro tonal shifting level.

I'm not going to explain every step in detail because I know that positive posts or indepth theory are hardly read on forums or facebook, but to get you started, experiment with any of the following pa5x plugins on an insert channel of the sound of your choice to achieve the widening effect:

- Stereo exiter / enhancer (set the msec for the enhancer left and right channel to your liking and don't forget to use the enhancer depth)
- Detune plugin (this is a very easy method to spread the sound when using low levels of detune)
- pitch shifter mod (this is more on micro tonal level, it's a little bit harder to learn
- ensemble (for a quick chorus like widening effect

you also can use reverb tricks with eq routing to do widen the sound, in that case be sure to set the correct routing on master fx level so that the effects works in the order you want them to react on each other.

and of course you could just edit the sound itself in sound edit mode, just copy the osc of your choice and assign lfo's to the tuning for an analog effect and pan the oscs as wide as you wish.

There are a lot of sound design techniques you could use in the pa5x ranging from easy to very complex, so it's worth to spend some time on these techniques and learn how to apply them.

leland_iko_music · Post by **leland_iko_music** » Mon Sep 25, 2023 9:37 am

Hi Qui,

Many thanks for the quick reply. I will certain try your suggestions. Having followed a lot of your tutorial videos on YT, you are definitely THE number one reference.

In my case for some of my loops, I try to do "Pink Floyd Style" renditions, where some of the synth sounds really need that very wide stereo effect.
Also the 4 default vocorder settings are all pretty much mono, but I overcome this by recording 2 to 3 vocorders across the stereo field. Would be nice to be able to do this for only one take though.

Kind regards

Leland

QuiRobinez · Post by **QuiRobinez** » Mon Sep 25, 2023 10:40 am

leland_iko_music wrote:
In my case for some of my loops, I try to do "Pink Floyd Style" renditions, where some of the synth sounds really need that very wide stereo effect.
Also the 4 default vocorder settings are all pretty much mono, but I overcome this by recording 2 to 3 vocorders across the stereo field. Would be nice to be able to do this for only one take though.

I'm sure that these effects method will work, for the vocoders, maybe there are effects in them (it's a separate chain) where you can achieve that M/S processing, you could also use the detune during the recording to spread the voices in stereo.

If you are recording your vocoder parts outside the pa5x (for instance by routing the vocals through seperate outs into your daw, then of course it's really easy to record your new material in one go.

Another famous trick is to record the main vocoder on one track and pan that medium left, then on the medium right use the same vocoder track but delay it with a few milliseconds (you can do this with the enhancer plugin), and then copy it again to two tracks with a lower volume and tune those to -5 and plus 7, then you have that massive vocal treatment you hear in a lot of songs.

NETWORK1 · Post by **NETWORK1** » Mon Sep 25, 2023 12:07 pm

Hi Leyland
Another technique is to Hard-Pan the L-R- Channels of the CHORUS fx

The 1st Example WITH
The 2nd example with-OUT

<iframe width="300" height="60" src="https://vocaroo.com/embed/1mCRLwiGpvlQ?autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay"></iframe><br><a href="https://voca.ro/1mCRLwiGpvlQ" title="Vocaroo Voice Recorder" target="_blank">

<iframe width="300" height="60" src="https://vocaroo.com/embed/19kuhn8TFrir?autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay"></iframe><br><a href="https://voca.ro/1mCRLwiGpvlQ" title="Vocaroo Voice Recorder" target="_blank">

leland_iko_music · Post by **leland_iko_music** » Mon Sep 25, 2023 12:59 pm

QuiRobinez wrote:
If you are recording your vocoder parts outside the pa5x (for instance by routing the vocals through seperate outs into your daw, then of course it's really easy to record your new material in one go.

I don't actually use a DAW at all. Everything is directly on the PA5X which then goes through the mixer and outboard reverb, into an RC505mk2 loopstation... so pretty much everything is "live" when recording.

I'll be sure to check out the options that you mentioned though.

Thanks again

Leland

leland_iko_music · Post by **leland_iko_music** » Mon Sep 25, 2023 1:00 pm

NETWORK1 wrote:Hi Leyland
Another technique is to Hard-Pan the L-R- Channels of the CHORUS fx

The 1st Example WITH
The 2nd example with-OUT

<iframe width="300" height="60" src="https://vocaroo.com/embed/1mCRLwiGpvlQ?autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay"></iframe><br><a href="https://voca.ro/1mCRLwiGpvlQ" title="Vocaroo Voice Recorder" target="_blank">

<iframe width="300" height="60" src="https://vocaroo.com/embed/19kuhn8TFrir?autoplay=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay"></iframe><br><a href="https://voca.ro/1mCRLwiGpvlQ" title="Vocaroo Voice Recorder" target="_blank">

Nice ! I'll try this ! Thanks a bunch !

Leland