How to position sound front to back(close/far away sounding)

[bullshark]

I'm mixing this little demo where I got this B3 playing a dronish thing. I want to position this sound farther in the back, any help or pointer?

Level doesn't cut it, just make it sound lower, not farther away in the back.

Reverb alone doesn't cut it either.

Tried EQing as I've read different frequencies react differently to proximity/distance but...Where do I start? What frequencies should I boos/cut/shelve? Should I use a combinations of EQ and reverb?

Any tips?

[birrbits]

far left/right pans?

[bullshark]

Hm, not sure I understand what you mean. Don't really want to have the sound coming from the right or left, I want it to sound like the instrument (a B3 in this case) sit in the back of the band.

I've had reasonable effect cutting above 10KHz and shelving above 4KHz and messing about with delays and/or reverb so far but I still have yet to find the perfect recipe.

[BLynx]

(deleted)

[celeber]

a crossfade would work. easy to achieve in ableton, but not sure what host you're using.

[sb.net]

lower the high end should make it sound like it isn't the main focus...

[birrbits]

Hm, not sure I understand what you mean. Don't really want to have the sound coming from the right or left, I want it to sound like the instrument (a B3 in this case) sit in the back of the band.

I understand & I was just thinking I would try a panning approach myself. An old analog trick to accomplish the 'back of the band' for a vocal chorus was to pan the tracks very far left & right. Nowadays there are a lot of panning, stereo imaging and mid-side plugs, one of which is bound to be at least somewhat helpful (if not instrumental) in accomplishing the sound you are after.

[afreshcupofjoe]

Cut the highs and subs, use a long wet reverb, mix in some delay, lower the dry signal. Should sound like it's coming from the other side of a canyon.

[annode]

You could convert the B3 to mono and pan it off center. You'll hear the difference right away.Then you can do the EQing and reverb very easily from there.Sometimes doing that and inverting the phase angle 180degs can set it off by itself even more.

Another way would be to send the B3 audio to a speaker or monitor. Set up a microphone a distance from it across the room, then record the B3 speaker with the mic.
Mono is fine. Add a bit of dimension with EQ/a stereo delay or ping pong delay/or some reverb.
Delay and reverb helps to place it in the master stereo image a bit better then just mono sometimes.

I've yet to hear a decent spacial vst except for the PSP Stereo Pack,which I like very much;
http://www.pspaudioware.com/plugins/stereopack.html
Nugen Audio make good,honest products.
Look at Stereo placer and Space Designer;
http://www.nugenaudio.com/products.php

[afreshcupofjoe]

Spatial and stereo placement plugins usually deal more with the position of the source around the listener. If you want farther back you need reverb and/or delay. Like annode said, the source should be mono. YOu can pan it to one side, but you don't want want to hear any stereo leslie effect or anything. The most important thing is that you turn the dry signal way down in your reverb and delay. If you have a big reverb on an instrument but the dry sound is dominant it will sound like the instrument is right in front of you and rverberating back into a large space. If you turn the dry signal down it will give the impression that you are hearing the instrument from a distance. Cutting high frequencies also helps because these frequencies are the first to deteriorate over distances. The farther away, the lower the cutoff. You don;t even need a huge reverb or anything. Even in a small padded room an instrument playing at the back of the room will have less high frequency content and have a slight delay compared to a sound occurring directly in front of you. The human brain is fairly good at picking up on these small differences.

[camsr]

try this:

heavy compression with a quick attack-> distortion (for the peak the compressor makes) -> reverb -> lowpass -> delay

[Kim Lajoie]

To push sounds further into the background, you don't need any magic plugins, just psychoacoustics:

1) Less bass. Much less bass. Natural sounds that are far away will have very little bass and low mids (unless they're truly huge sounds in movies), because lower frequencies require much more power to travel. The reverse of this is the proximity effect - where sounds very close to your ear (whispering I hope!) or very close to the microphone tend to have much stronger lower frequencies. To roll off the bass, try a low-strength (1-pole or similar) high pass filter. Start low and shift it up until you no longer "feel" the sound.

2) Less treble. Less sparkle, less definition. Natural sounds that are far away will have reduced higher frequencies due to absorption by air and other materials. Distant sounds also have much less definition and clarity. Often a low-strength (1-pole of similar) low pass filter (with no resonance!) will work well.

3) Reverb, modulation. As above, distant sounds tend to have much less definition and clarity. You should do whatever's appropriate in the mix to "unfocus" the sound. Sometimes more reverb will do it. Often a very short reverb will work best. It doesn't have to be a strict room - just something to diffuse the sound. Sometimes chorus or even subtle phaser will work better. It depends on the mix - you're trying to reduce the clarity of the sound.

4) Collapse to mono. Distant sounds do not wrap around the listener's head. They're often not "wide" (unless they're truely huge sounds in movies). Sometimes a full mono collapse isn't appropriate though - it depends on the sound. You might want to retain a little width in atmospheric sounds (like pads). Sometimes leaving a little width will improve the diffusion in the sound (when a full mono collapse might make it more focussed).

5) Pan centre. This works for two reasons. Firstly, sounds that are panned to the side tend to "creep up" closer to the listener. Imagine the soundstage in front of you as a semicircle - the sounds on the side can (all things being equal) actually get closer to the "front" than the sounds in the center. Also, panning centre will hide the background sounds behind other foreground typically also panned centre (such as lead vocal and snare, depending on your genre). This will make it mroe difficult for the listener to focus on the background.

6) Compose it in the background. To support the above, you should actually compose the parts as background parts. Again, this means understanding the application of psychoacoustics to composition. As listeners, we tend to focus on sounds that are:
- louder
- higher pitched
- moving quickly
- not repeating in short cycles (EDM- I'm looking at you!)
- phrased (ie. not constant)

Likewise, background parts will be the opposite:
- quieter
- lower pitched
- moving slowly
- repeating patterns
- unphrased

Likewise, background is only ever a relative measure. If your background part isn't getting far enough in the background, it could be that you don't have anything far enough in the foreground. Just like everything else in music - if everything is background, nothing is background.

Of course, this is all fundamental composition technique. Believe it or not, we all can learn from the classics.

-Kim.

[PeterL]

You could also try WaveArts Panorama.
It's not the cheapest, but does a good job for placing sound in a virtual room.

[annode]

Here's my 2 cents;

When we hear depth from a sound in a recording,it's not often easy to know how it was done,what size room it was recorded in, or what other things are involved. This makes it hard to use other recordings as guides for creating depth.IMO.

Here is a simple recording of 3 woodpeckers at different depths in a forest.
Unless you have been chained to a pole in the basement all your life you have been in a forest and know what that "environment" sounds like and have experienced how all the trees are one big predictable ,reflective,diffusive reverb chamber.

Listen to each woodpecker closely to hear how the sound is different and gives the perception of depth.

http://home.comcast.net/~newdabranck/mu ... specht.mp3
...and if ya REALLY like your woodpeckers cooked, ya gotta hear dis;
http://home.comcast.net/~newdabranck/mu ... _Dream.mp3

Turned out to be a knowledgable thread.

[Kim Lajoie]

(updated to include mono collapse, more reverb, and filters)

-Kim.