Width settings

[The_G]

When it comes to your own work, what do you do with width settings on the SSL console? Do you reduce stereo width for bass and drum tracks so they have more of a mono feel, or do you keep them wide? What advantages does your chosen method have?

Thanks in advance!

[selig]

I am careful with this control because of the way it works, which is probably not well known to many.

What I'm talking about has to do with the panning of stereo sources when width is not full "mono".

First, when you set the width to mono, the pan control works exactly as you would expect: pan left and the mono signal goes left, pan right and the mono signal goes right.

But with a stereo source and the width not set to mono, things get "tricky". Let's take an extreme case to illustrate what happens. For this example, assume a stereo drum track with kick panned hard left, and snare hard right. If you leave width fully "wide", and pan hard left, all you will hear is kick (no snare). Pan hard right and you'll hear only snare (no kick). This is probably not what many would expect - I for one would expect that when you pan a stereo source to one side you would STILL hear both channels, but they would both come from the side to which you have panned. In the above example, what I would EXPECT is this: when panned hard left I would hear kick and snare from the left channel, and when panned hard right I would expect to hear kick and snare coming from the right. This would be equivalent to having two mono channels, and panning both to one side, the other side, or one to each side (stereo).

BUT, like I said this is NOT what happens, and it's best to be aware of this when working with the Reason Pan control - and BTW, this is how ALL mixers in Reason operate on stereo signals, for whatever reasons.

The more you know!