Original subtitles

Hi! It's Alan Meyerson from Mix With The Masters.

I'm doing a short little video for you about different things.

And so a question has been asked,

"What do I do when I have a mono sound

and I want to create a stereo image out of it?"

And there's a lot of ways to do this.

In this particular piece

I have a dulcimer,

which is a very simple little sound.

It's pretty mono.

There's a couple of things you can do.

First of all,

there's the...

and this might not work so well with something this percussive,

but the simple idea of just adding a tiny bit of delay,

which is like 8 or 10 milliseconds, or even less.

Right now this is 5 milliseconds of delay,

or 225 samples approximately, to one side.

You'll get a much wider image.

And then if you balance left and right,

you get a pretty effective way to do it.

The only thing is with that, on a sound this percussive,

is you really do lose a little bit of the impact of the sound

so you can try to tighten it up.

There are other ways to do it.

One of the ways to do it is just to add a very, very short reverb

and I use for that a couple of different things.

I like the 2016, the Eventide Stereo Room,

where I make it 100% Wet,

and as dry as I can...

100% Wet and as close as I can make it.

And I find that I get great imaging out of this.

So you can hardly tell it's doing anything

until you take it out and you go,

"Oh my God, it sounds dead and flat."

Now it's got this beautiful image.

So that brought us a long way.

But there's another technique that's really a lot of fun,

and that's just using sort of a random auto-panner.

And the one I use for this, I don't use an actual panner, I use the Tremolator.

And I set it,

you go into it, and if you take the Width and go to 100%,

it actually, in fact, turns it into a panner.

But then you could pick a couple of interesting patterns

or you could make your own pattern,

which I like to do a lot,

just sort of messing around with the pattern a little bit.

And I know it sounds weird, but believe me,

this one might sound better

as a dotted quarter or something.

When you just mix it,

it just gives it a little bit of movement.

See how without it,

it's sitting in one spot.

Now, all of a sudden, it's got a little bit of movement in it.

Basically what I've done is I've taken the mix blend,

which in this case is called Depth,

and I've backed it off to about 40%,

and I've played with the Feel a little bit

just to get it so that it's got a little movement to it.

And now, with that,

putting that back into maybe that room simulation...

So you've taken something that started...

...like that.

You're just sitting in one place,

and now it's got

all kinds of movement in it,

and yet it doesn't really sound wet.

I need a little bit more gain back from it.

So it puts it onto a sound.

It puts it into a staging, it gives it some staging,

it gives it some imaging, but it doesn't necessarily sound wet

or in the back of the room, it still has focus and presence.

But because it has a tiny bit of movement on it,

and it has a tiny bit of a very, very short reverb...

you can use other short reverbs, you can use rooms and stuff,

one of the popular ones instead of the 2016 that I like

is the Altiverb preset that you call up.

But this one you can't use at 100%.

You've got to back it off.

It's a little bit wet.

Actually, you know what?

Better than that is if you go into the Studio space

and you go into the Allaire room.

That's a good one.

I mean, there's a million ways to do that.

Basically a very short reverb and a little bit of auto-panning

with a sort of random...

especially on something fast like that, a random pattern.

If you have something that's not fast like that or not transient,

you could still do the auto-panning

and just sort of blend it in there just a little bit.

It's very, very effective. It works on keyboard pads,

it works on guitars,

blending it in there a little bit,

and it makes a big difference.

So thanks a lot.