From the course: Audition: Third-Party Plugins

Making mono audio into stereo with PS22 Stereo Maker - Audition Tutorial

From the course: Audition: Third-Party Plugins

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Making mono audio into stereo with PS22 Stereo Maker

- [Instructor] With the PS22 Stereo Maker plugin from Waves you can take mono recording and convert it to a stereo mix. So for example I have this recording of a field that was done with a single microphone, and I can tell that because I have this one channel in the clip. Now what I'd like to do is use this as background ambience for a scene, but I want it to have a more immersive stereo sound. So to add the plugin I'm going to select my track, go up to my effects menu, down to VST3, spacial, waves, and in here I have a few variations of the same plugin. Essentially they all do the same thing, but there are just a few small difference between them. So with the split version of the plugin, this will actually split the frequency of your audio across the stereo stage, and this is good for a more dramatic mix. Down here with XSplit it does the same thing as split, but it also has added delay controls, which makes it ideal for working with audio that already has a stereo mix to it, and then this one here, PS22 spread, creates a smooth stereo mix and it's really good for converting mono to stereo. So I think I'll go with this one. I should also mention we do have a stereo version and a mono to stereo version of each of these variations of the plugin. So it's important to choose the one that's right for your audio. So in this case I'm going to choose PS22 spread mono to stereo. I'll select this, and it opens up the effects window. I find that a good preset to start with for this kind of work is to choose the mono track enhancer. So I'll start with that, and if you look at this graph in the middle, it's basically showing us what the plugin is doing. We have frequency running from low frequencies down the bottom here to high frequencies at the top, and horizontally we have our stereo mix. We have extreme left, center, and extreme right, and what the plugin is doing is taking different sections of the frequency and panning them left or right to create our stereo mix. Let's have a listen to how our audio sounds before we've actually done this. So I'm going to disable the effect for a moment and just play it back so we can hear the original. (birds chirping) Okay, so that's our mono recording. I'll just move this back to the start, and I'll enable the effect again. Now let's listen to it with this preset stereo mix on it. (birds chirping) So if you were listening to that with headphones or stereo speakers, you should be able to hear that's there's a difference between the left or right, and it creates the sense of a stereo space. Now there are a few controls for tweaking the sound of this effect. I'll just move the effect window back into the middle, and down here we have our spread cursor. So by dragging this outwards, this is actually increasing the stereo mix. If I drag it all the way back towards the center, it goes back to a mono signal. So what I'll do is I'll start with my mono signal here, and then as I play back the track, I'll drag this out so you can hear it gradually becoming more stereo. (birds chirping) So you hear you can really push the extremes of that stereo space by dragging that cursor out. By dragging the cursor up I'm actually controlling the frequency at which the spread starts to occur. So if I drag it all the way down to the bottom, it's starting down here at about 32 hertz. So all of those low frequencies are being included in our stereo mix. The more I drag this up, the more I'm excluding those low frequencies. Now by default the lower frequencies don't spread as wide as the higher frequencies, but you can change this by holding down the option key on a Mac or alt on a PC and dragging the spread cursor outwards. You can see you can start to increase the width of those lower frequencies. The other cursor up here on the graph is the density cursor, and this controls the center point where the frequency sweeps are closer together. So for example I know that the bird sounds in my audio are happening around about two kilohertz to six kilohertz. So if I want to spread more of the frequencies in this area, I can drag the density cursor so that it's in that area, and then by dragging outwards it will actually increase the number of sweeps in that area. So you'll see my sweeps here are much closer together here than they are down here. Let's have a listen to how this sounds. (birds chirping) So you can hear in that area where the birds are chirping the stereo mix is a lot busier there. If I wanted to simplify that spread, I would just need to drag the cursor back the other way. Have a listen to how this sounds. (birds chirping) You can also control the number of frequency sweeps by clicking this box down here called sweeps. So I can actually reduce this to as low as two sweeps, which is actually quite simple. Let's hear how this sounds. (birds chirping) That's a very extreme type of stereo mix. As I play it back I'll increase the number of sweeps, and you can hear how complicated the mix becomes. (birds chirping) So that's the PS22 Stereo Maker plugin from Waves. We think you can produce some really excellent results whether you're converting a mono recording to stereo or you just want to enhance something that's already stereo.

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