Enhance Your Reason Tracks With Stereo Separation

ill o.g.
Battle Points: 3
One great way to add another layer to your music is by adding subtle stereo separation. You do this by adding a tiny delay to either the right or left channel of a track. It's easy to set-up in Reason.

First start a new project. This should start you out with mastering suite and a mixer. Now create a sound unit, I'll use Redrum Drum Computer as an example, and create a DDL-1 Digital Delay Line.

Press Tab to flip the rack and get ready to rewire it for stereo separation. Now remove either the right or left input cable of the delay unit from the Redrum output and patch it directly into the proper mixer input. So, you should have either right or left output of Redrum going to the delay line then to the mixer, and the other output going directly into the mixer.

Flip the rack back. On the Digital Delay Line select the little ms (milliseconds) button, this will allow you to change the time of the delay. First boost the delay time number to test the channel separation, try around 400. Now when you hit a note you will hear it first on one side then the delay on the other stereo side. As right then left or left then right, depending how you connected it. Once this is working just drop the delay time from 400 to a really quick delay time. Play around with a time of 10 to 40 ms, this should give you a great start to stereo separating your tracks.

Now you will have a Reason track where one side triggers slightly after the other which creates a layer of time and space. This works great on drums, especially hi-hats. Experiment within Reason as it is a deep program and good luck.
 

Daikomo

ILLIEN
ill o.g.
I'm about to try it.. But um.. a lil weak when it comes ot the back of the rack. I always F' something up and lose sound to a rack.
 

Hi-Lo

ILLIEN
ill o.g.
stereo separation is very good but there's a couple of things you want to keep in mind...

don't stereo separate everything. stereo separation creates a higher degree of masking (obscures other elements of your mix) the wider and louder sounds are stereo spread (i.e. spreading some backing strings at low vol @ 15% L/R isnt gonna mask too much, but spreading a big synth 100/100 and cranking it up will mask your entire mix). part of the art of mixing is knowing what to stereo separate and what to keep in the middle, and exactly how much stereo separation you should have for each element. point is- don't stereo spread everything 100%!

also in general you will find delay times around 40 ms will lose their fattening ability and often split the sound into two distinct sounds, which isnt what this technique is for...the human brain can't perceive separation less than 30ms but once you go over that barrier this technique gets harder to pull off, so just bear that in mind.

good post wings, cause stereo separation is key to getting a 'full' mix.
 

Cheo

ILLIEN
ill o.g.
Another great post Wings. Is this from the Daw Dozens article? Post up the rest of those tips!
 

LDB

Banned
ill o.g.
Battle Points: 73
Wings is the man!!!

Here's another way I found to achieve the same effect:

By pass auto-routing by holding down shift on your keyboard and create a Dr.Rex Loop player. Load a recycle loop preferably a drum loop. Copy the REX slice data to the Dr. REX 1 sequencer track. Hit tab on your keyboard to flip rack to the back. Connect the Dr. Rex right audio output to the mixer channel 2 left input. Bypass auto-routing and create a CF-101 Chorus/Flanger. Connect the Dr. REX left audio output to the CF-101 left input. Connect the CF-101 left output to the mixer channel 1 left input. Set the CF-101 delay to 36 and LFO mod amount to 0, and enable send mode(bottom right on CF-101)

Toggle the CF-101 bypass on and off to see the effect u get. U can also play around with the feedback. Leave the other knobs as is. I also recommend panning channel 1 on the mixer hard left and channel 2 hard right for an even better stereo effect.

Try it and see what u think.
 

Kontents

I like Gearslutz
ill o.g.
Battle Points: 5
i think u should make a vid on stuff like this wing
same for u too lil drama
it is easier to see it done
i use the 2 vocoader trick but i notice when i do it that way i cant really use the vocoaders to eq the the main output mix!!??? any one know whats up!!

are you adding the Vocoders to the Master Audio Device at the very top? cause if you have the Mixer hitting the Vocoder to the Audio Out put you should have the access to adjust it.
 

inflict3

ILLIEN
ill o.g.
shit!! wings, that is the best shit ive read all week!!!!! it always amazes me, its the little things, the things so little, you just dont think about, that make all the difference...
 

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