Stereo Width Trick

Here is a neat and easy trick to give your sounds that wide stereo feel. This can be applied to anything you wish and is a very effective way to make a sound or a riff really stand out.

First take a listen to this sample of an overdriven acid baseline . . .

This was made with a simple single oscillator synth and overdriven using Amplitube, a guitar amp modeling plug in.
Gentle filter shaping was applied with the use of the filter envelope and the extreme low end was removed before passing it through the guitar amp effect which made sure that it did not flap out too much and kept a nice tight sound.
All very cool sounding but in my opinion a little flat a central.

Now check out this next sample . . . .

Instantly you will notice how wide the riff is and how much energy it now has.
This was done using a simple trick with a delay plug in.
I used the Waves Supertap for this. Make sure that the plug in you use can pan independant tap channels.
I have the left side set at a delay value of zero and the right side set at a delay value of 16ms.
There is also a third tap signal which is set at 1/8th note delay and panned just off centre.

Other ways to create stereo width inclue:
Duplicating the sound, panning hard left and hard right before altering the pitch of one side to your desired level.
Again, duplicating the sound, panning hard left and right but this time having slight to extreme eq difference between each side.

All these techniques can be combined to really polish certain areas of a track but beware that if this is done on too much, then nothing will stand out anymore.