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Giving up on phasing

Interested, I checked out the Grosso trailer. Whoever made the last pass on that should be dragged to a course on mastering. The whole audio is so horribly out of phase it sounds like absolute horror and makes my brain get a syntax error. You don't need a phase correlation meter to hear instantly that it's completely fu**ed up phase- wise.

Seriously, this is not the way to do it and this is definitely not sounding good. It feels for me that you might be thinking that "wide is good" just like people thought earlier that "loud is good", despite of the horrible pumping and distorting the overlimiting did to the sound. Just like loud is good when done right, wide is good.... when done right. And this Grosso- trailer is done horribly wrong.

The wide sound is firstly dependant of your source material, then the usage of clever panning, doubling, right reverbs and possible delays and then finally, if you REALLY need to, you can adjust the sides to be a bit louder than the center if you really have to in the mastering phase. All this takes a lot of learning and good mixing skills, and taking cheap shortcuts is only degrading your final product's quality in the end.

For the love of all that's good and decent- now when I've heard that Grosso trailer, please don't ruin your mixes like this. You'll thank yourself later.
Yes this track has lots of problems not just phasing. Strings and brass almost disappear when played in mono and it loose a lot of power and loudness. Even with lots of phasing stage doesn't sound very wide at all. You can achieve same width as in this track without any problems. Also it feels like something missing in mid channel because of those problems. Even playback in stereo is sounding weird. It feels like there is a hole or something. But what is worse is that distortion everywhere. Very hard to listen no matter the volume.

I agree this is very bad mix.
 
non serious response-
Yes, sure widen it out until you are happy hearing it sound like you’re head is being flushed down a toilet bowl- go ahead. For the rest of the planet, make a mono compatible version.
I hate that feeling too, but a bit of subtle widening with panagement or ozone imager (both just for simple widening without using any kind of delays etc.) on orchestral samples never gives me that feel. I used those all the time to make different libraries blend together better.

Why don’t you instead learn how to manipulate tracks using Haas panning ? It collapses better into mono. And while we’re at it, if the goal is more exciting mixes/orchestration, then....make more interesting music. Widening it out is a fool’s game. No one else will think it’s a superior mix.

But I digresss... what do I know anyway
Maybe I misunderstood something along the way, but I always thought that haas panning by definition messes with the phase correlation and is less mono compatible than a bit of simple widening. I just tried this:
-add a track with a finished track from an orchestral soundtrack to your daw
-duplicat the track
-add one instance of izotope relay on each, set both to mono, one to also phase invert
-both tracks now phase cancel to silence
-add panagement before relay on one of the tracks
-tweak widening knob to extreme values from 0 to 200%
-sound stays silent, meaning mono signal doesn't change at all from simple widening with panagement
-removed panagement and added another relay instance instead
-tweak right channel delay with relay, which to my understand is haas effect panning (correct me if I'm wrong)
-the signal instantly no longer cancels out, meaning the mono signal does change (as expected)


On a signal that has low phase correlation to begin with, like hard panned double tracked guitars, I wouldn't add even a bit of widening, as it pulls the average phase correlation almost instantly into the negative, which sounds bad. But on a signal that already has pretty good phase correlation internally, like e.g. a viola section, I see no problem whatsoever with adding a tiny bit of widening as long as the average phase correlation stays "positive enough".

Sidenote: on the double tracked guitars the haas panning does basically not change the impression you get from the stereo signal, except mess up the timing. I think the more mono your signal is, the worse the problems of using haas panning will be, but there's a time and place for everything.


Interested, I checked out the Grosso trailer. Whoever made the last pass on that should be dragged to a course on mastering. The whole audio is so horribly out of phase it sounds like absolute horror and makes my brain get a syntax error. You don't need a phase correlation meter to hear instantly that it's completely fu**ed up phase- wise.

Seriously, this is not the way to do it and this is definitely not sounding good. It feels for me that you might be thinking that "wide is good" just like people thought earlier that "loud is good", despite of the horrible pumping and distorting the overlimiting did to the sound. Just like loud is good when done right, wide is good.... when done right. And this Grosso- trailer is done horribly wrong.

The wide sound is firstly dependant of your source material, then the usage of clever panning, doubling, right reverbs and possible delays and then finally, if you REALLY need to, you can adjust the sides to be a bit louder than the center if you really have to in the mastering phase. All this takes a lot of learning and good mixing skills, and taking cheap shortcuts is only degrading your final product's quality in the end.

For the love of all that's good and decent- now when I've heard that Grosso trailer, please don't ruin your mixes like this. You'll thank yourself later.
Is that the one?






Regarding hard and fast "rules" in general, it was quite eye opening to do some detailed analysis on some of the Doom soundtrack tracks by Mick Gordon. He quite regularly dips his toes into the forbidden zones of negative phase correlation, but he uses it as a very deliberate effect, like another color on the palette to set accents and contrasts. It was super interesting to listen to soloed mid and side channels with ozone's mid-side eq and wonder about things like "why the hell are the drums mono on this track???" or "why are the kick drums louder on the sides than the mid?" (it was haas panning iirc).

I recently heard some smart advice from a professional concept artist regarding rules in drawing and learning from teachers. It was something along these lines: "Whenever your teacher says 'never do that', you say 'ok', then you go home, and do exactly that forbidden thing and find out how you can make it work, and under what circumstances it can work. There is almost nothing that deserves to 'never' be done and I've learned a lot from this and found techniques that work for me personally that otherwise I never would have found. Then go back to your drawing course, but don't tell your teacher what you did. Most aren't willing to accept that some of these 'rules' are really nonsense and drawing is way too deep of a topic to be condensed down into this purely scientific way of thinking."

YMMV of course
 
Any opinion out there? Plan is to start to widen stuff and not care about phase issues so much. If its good in stereo, thats it, if someone wants to listen to it in mono, and there phasing, then who cares.

Does this sound reasonable?
Not long term, no.

Think of all your favorite music. Was it mixed with “bad” phasing issues where instruments disappeared? No, chances are you like it (in part) because it was mixed “well” and sounded good wherever you played it.

What sounds reasonable is that you currently enjoy the sound of over-wide phasey mixes today, and we’ve all fallen in love with that sound...

...until we fall out of love with it ...

...because we hear it on a different system or in a different context, think “hey that’s not MY mix is it?” and we eventually realize it’s worth figuring out how to make mixes translate to a variety of listening conditions (without dropouts and other issues associated with phasing).
 
It all depends on the sound you're widening imo. I don't care if my pads are ''out of phase'' I want them to be in many situations. I just check that the haas effect isn't causing weird tones in mono, or if it's a rhythmic source, how bad the double transient is.

For strings and brass, having them too wide can ruin the focus, depth and clarity of the mix so the precedence settings become very important for example. All depends on the library as well. A library that is wetter will not ''care'' as much about timing differences. Same thing for recordings in small vs big spaces.

Widening mono sources is a lot trickier than widening stereo sources as well.

Putting the haas effect on a small close mic'd library will most likely sound a** and the violins will sound like they're coming from all directions at once but using precedence to add slight timing differences to a wet library will be just fine.
 
If it sounds good in mono:

-it just might sound better in stereo ( done right )

-and it might even sound glorious in surround ( again if done right )

Funny thing about surround is we end up having to think mono due to the increased speakers and space. Phasing stuff to ‘widen it’ has little benefit because we have at our disposal other ways of making the sound have more dimension.
But here’s the thing, even in surround, stereo / mono compatibility still is very important, especially if you are in media. Why? Well that has to do with how media is consumed downstream.

I still remember that fateful day in New York, at Tribecca Film fest where a film I scored was showcased. Due to a bad dolby print, the audio playback was messed up. I won’t go into the gory details, but anything mono survived the carnage, and it was a lesson, a hard lesson to learn.

So you will excuse me for the indulgence, but I smell an accident waiting to happen with those disciples of ‘Wider is Better’ religion.

But again, what the hell do I know....
 
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