synth width and the mix

[sloth]

so recently i kinda discovered that massive's dimension expander kinda messes up the mix when used too much. i realized that most my synths were taking over the mix and there its was hard as hell to dial them back while maintaining their power. my new way is to apply about 5% on both the dry wet so i get just a smidgen of the effect. ive been using sample delays and sometime ozone recently to get the width on the top end while keeping my bas mostly mono

my question is would it be a good idea to make a more or less centered sounding bass, rout it to 2 channels, 1 of which would be a regular sounding bass and the other would be a high passed EQ with M/S mode turned on so all the mids were entirely cut out? this occurred to me and seemed like it could be a good way to have precise control over where the spread is happened, and the volume of it. Ozone is too CPU heavy for me and i feel like if i properly multiband compressed each of these sends i could keep the mono signal heavy in the low frequencies and push the side information to really give the bass some width.....

is this a good idea or kinda over doing it?

[test_recordings]

Just use EQ as a crossover and play with everything above the bass frequencies. You don't need to make two bass tracks. In fact, put a high-pass EQ on your aux sends and put FX etc through that.

Don't ask, just try it and get back to us.

[Sure_Fire]

Get yourself a copy of tone projects basslane, it's a little cpu friendly freeware plugin that sends everything below a selected frequency to mono, so you can keep your bass nice and neat. If it's last in your FX chain you can use all the stereo widening tools you want and still have mono bass, I usually route all my drop synths through a send before going out to the master to compress them all together and have a basslane last in the chain to tighten up the lows, beats putting it on every channel.

[Mr 50]

Maybe put these two as send channels (with filter on the send channel)

Stand Alone Dimension Expander VST

Quick Quak Up Stereo

[district]

you have to be careful with that dimension expander plugin though because when you reload a project it often/always forgets the settings you had it on.

can be a nightmare if you are returning to mixdowns

[sloth]

i downloaded upstereo but when i try to open it in ableton is just quits the program... maybe ill just make a live rack that has samples delay's across the frequency range and that way i can just spread bands separately. maybe ill just load the standalone DE vst and throw that on the rack.


@district, what range do you start to spread your bass at? loving all the new releases btw,

[ieatfunk]

Get yourself a copy of tone projects basslane, it's a little cpu friendly freeware plugin that sends everything below a selected frequency to mono, so you can keep your bass nice and neat. If it's last in your FX chain you can use all the stereo widening tools you want and still have mono bass, I usually route all my drop synths through a send before going out to the master to compress them all together and have a basslane last in the chain to tighten up the lows, beats putting it on every channel.

That sounds like a really awesome little plugin to have. Is it AU? Could you provide link so I don't have to search? Heheh