Stereo width, bass mono, and surviving a phone
Working on the middle and the sides separately — how to open a mix up without dragging the vocal off centre, and why the bottom octave gets folded to mono.
Stereo width, done the way a master can survive. It works on the middle and the sides separately, folds the bass below the crossover to mono so nothing cancels on a phone or a club rig, and its air shelf opens the sides more than the middle — so the top comes up without dragging the vocal off centre.
The controls
Every range and starting value below is the one the processor actually uses — this page is generated from it.
- Width
- 1.0 is the mix as it came in. Up to 1.2 is a real widening; past 1.4 you're mostly making the mono version worse.
- Bass mono
- Everything below this is folded to the centre. 120 Hz is the standard, costs nothing audible, and stops the low end cancelling on anything that sums to mono.
- Air
- A shelf above 11k, weighted towards the sides. This is what makes a mix sound finished rather than filtered — one or two dB is usually the whole trick.
Sonic Station's mix finisher runs this entirely in your browser — the audio is never uploaded anywhere.
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