I was messing around with Ozone´s stereo imager last night and I thought to my self "I need to learn how to do this!"
It seems like an effect one should be able to accomplish in the mixing stage. I printed out some of the sticky threads in this forum and one of them talked, in some detail, about creating the allusion of space.
Could this Ozone effect just be using pan and delay in clever ways? It also allows you to apply the effect independently to 4 adjustable frequency ranges. It´s not just a left and right effect, it sounds like a room with some frequencies up front and some in the background.
Has anyone heard this plugin and do you have experience creating this sort of "space" manually?
I got Ozone when I was young and starry eyed LOL.
As others have said the widener works by slightly phase shifting the signal. at first listen WOW! So wide and cool sounding.... However.. move out of the sweet spot and poof, not only does the width disappear, you can also suffer from phase cancellation which diminishes your mix.
It's a very false sense of width because it's not placing items within the stereo field. It's actually smearing the stereo field by putting the entire mix slightly out of phase so that the Left and Right channels are no longer sync'd up and so, when you are well placed between the speakers, the whole thing sounds spacey but there is no sense of pinpoint detail
I have been finding a far more effective way of creating space is a combination of things. IMO
1) Arrangement.. Know what you want playing at various places in the mix
2) Priority... what needs to call attention to itself and what can float in the background
3) Panning... I use LCR panning (Left, Center, Right) for high priority items that need to be definitively placed in the stereo field, for background sound I use soft panning (for example 50% Right) that can fill in the spaces
4) Reverb.. I avoid stereo verbs as much as possible as it seems to fill up all of the space. I try to use mono reverbs and tuck them into spots between the instruments instead
5) Low pass filters.... stuff that is even a few feet away loses a lot of high end information when we hear it for real. Using Low Pass filters or Shelving to roll of high frequencies can help push things that do not need to sound right up in your face to sound more further away (not just quieter and washed out with verb) which can add depth as well as width
6) EQ.... try to get the essence of the sound and roll off anything that doesn't add to that that to create more space for all of the mix elements
7) When looking for width, multi track and layer rather than use 1 track and mix widening tricks...For example two separately recorded and hard panned guitars will sound much wider than one guitar with chorusing or widening tricks
8) Record mono sounds and place them rather than trying to fill up the mix with to many space eating stereo sounds, synths and FX
Remember most sounds we hear in real life are a mono source and our "stereo" ears are used to triangulate where they are in the space around us, try and translate that into your mix to generate space the way our ears are used to hearing it rather than tricking them by phase shifting and so on. After the first couple of listens your ears get wise to it and realize that it's not how real width/depth/space sounds and it just starts to sound wierd.
Ozone is useful for the limiter which is pretty good in intelligent or intelligent II mode as a final thing to add a couple of dB of loudness. The phase cancellation monitors and flip to mono is also useful for checking your mix if you don't have a monitor controller that can do this, but other than that I have found the most useful thing I have gotten from Ozone is a good education in what not to do to try and fix my mix
Of course I'm no Grammy winning engineer so YMMV
