anybody tried this trick?

[joedirt]

I don't know where I got it or if it truely works but it's interesting nontheless.

To work out what reverbs and effects someone has used in a mix that you want to emulate, do the following... Take the two sides of a stereo mix and pull them up on 2 faders on the desk. Instead of panning them left and right, pan them both to the centre. Flip the phase of one side. The result is that the original dry signal all but dissapears as the out of phase signal cancels out the in phase signal. What you are left with is the effects that have been added on to create ambience/ reverb etc. allowing you to hear what type of effects have been used during mixing. You can then add simillar efects to your mix

Just wondering if anyone has ever tried this and/or how accurate it is?

 

[crawdad]

I've done it on more than one occasion! In some cases, I was pretty startled to hear the effects used behind a voice--especially when the voice sounded pretty dry in the mix. It taught me to try things like long reverbs and different delay and tap delays--then turn them down so that they were not obvious at all. It can really help add life to vocals without flooding them in effects. I think its a pretty cool trick myself!

 

[Blue Bear Sound]

That is the technique used to listen to the L-R component of the stereo signal - a stereo signal is made up of a L+R component and an L-R component (the difference signal.)

Of course it works, you're listening to the entire signal component that is NOT in common between the 2 speakers....

Which is basically all stereo effects, and any tracks panned off-centre... it's very interesting - you hear a lot of "covered-up" things (errors, bad edits, etc...)

Bruce