I’ve been mixing my songs taking consideration of panning of instruments. Now that I have come to the part where I want to export my songs, I have been looking into mastering and I’ve encountered a dilema regarding the use of stereoenhancer;
While watching a mastering video made by a producer, I’ve noticed he added a stereo enhancing plugin in his master bus. This is confusing, wouldn’t this invalidate the panning of individual instruments in the mix? is this common practice? if so what is the point of panning?
I also imported songs of top recording artists into a project and I observed that both the left and right image of the audio track mirror each other, so I guess that means again, there is no real panning going on these tracks. So should I just stereoenhace everything in the final bus? what do you guys do?
It may seem like a trite response - but - use your ears. If you put the enhancer on and it sounds better - great - if it doesn’t - take it off.
I don’t like stereo enhancers on mix buses unless they have high pass filtering or are multi-band (so I can defeat the low end bands) as stereo enhancers can make a mix lose focus down low.
If you’re using stock plugin, add a stereo enhancer FX track with a high pass filter before the enhancer at say 1K and send to that from all your non bass channels, then mix that into the track.
Thank you for your answer. Could you or someone else please walk me through this though, I know this is basic stuff, but I’m still in mixing infancy here. Please let me know if this is correct:
1- added stereoenhancer as an FX track
2- I sent there my vocal bus and some vst synth tracks. I did this using the ‘Audio Sends’ slots on these tracks.
3- In the stereo FX channel I added a Frequency EQ and cut everything under 1k Hz as a form of high pass filter, is this correct? or is there a different plugin in Cubase that I should use instead? I found the plugins under the Filter section confusing.
4- I set up the output routing of my stereoenhacer FX track to ‘Master’, which is my master bus which is then routed to ‘Stereo Out’.
After I did this I noticed my whole mix sound devoided of bass frequencies, what am I doing wrong? Is the routing to blame? something else? maybe the EQ is not like a high pass filter?
Might be phase issues, try playing with the high pass frequency as any EQ always causes phase smearing to some degree, or don’t low pass, use a mid upwards high shelf instead to make the bass part of the track relatively quieter.