Creating a fat, wide mix is crucial to getting that ‘larger than life’ feel out of your tracks. To do so, you to need take advantage of the width in your stereo field. There are many effects that can help you maximize stereo width. The Haas Effect is a psychoacoustic effect whereby the same audio signal reaches the left and right stereo channels at slightly different times. The perceived audio effect is a wider sound.
Let’s say you had a synth riff that was conflicting with a vocal track. You could use the Haas effect to widen the synth riff and thus, create more space for your vocal.
We can easily accomplish this with some stereo or ping pong delay, so let’s get started.
Step 1 – Choose a sound you want to widen and load up a stereo delay processor.
For our example, we chose a keyboard sound without any additional effects on it.
Take a listen:
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Step 2 -Set your Left and Right Delay times.
Set your Left Delay to 30ms and set your Right Delay to 50ms.
This means our audio signal will reach the left channel 20ms before the right channel.
This difference in timing of 20ms is essentially the core behind the Haas Effect. Typically, you want to keep the timing difference within 40ms to maximize the effect.
Step 3 – Increase your Output Mix
To maximize our stereo width we’ll increase our Output Mix to 100%. You can tweak this as necessary. These values will likely change based on other sounds in your mix. Higher Output values will result in more stereo width and lower values will result in less width.
Step 4 – Clean up with High and Low Cuts
Be sure to set your Feedback controls to 0%.
Lastly, we can polish up our sound with some High and Low Cuts.
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Summary
The Haas Effect is a great way to maximize the stereo width of a sound. Remember to keep the difference between your left and right channels to a difference of 40ms (preferably less). Too much of a difference and you’ll loose the effect. Also, remember that subtle panning can have a big impact on creating more width and space in your mix as well.
We hope you found this tutorial helpful. Check in regularly for more great articles from LoopGalaxy!
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