In which ways do you prefer to widen your sounds and why?

[geroyannis]

I am narrowing or monoing things at least twice as often as widening.
There might be one element in a track that needs a big wide effect, maybe. But theres tons of stuff that ends up too wide for me by the time mixing is happening.

That. Narrowing is happening more often than widening here. I work mainly with rock, punk, metal, etc. Loud music with distorted guitars.

Sometimes it happens that I only have one rhythm guitar part that needs widening and there's no chance of recording additional tracks. In that case the mono-to-stereo plugin in Cubase does the trick just fine.

I also strongly think that music should be mixed with mono compatibility in mind. I guess that not many people sit at the sweet spot between their speakers when listening to music.

Lastly, whenever I mix the live sound of a band in a club I always do it in mono because I want every customer to hear everything regardless of where they're standing.

[Loki Fuego]

I often have a certain rhythmic elements of my tracks hard-panned. It greatly improves stereo image of the track. Basically if you have instrument which is playing 1/8th notes you pan one note hard left and the next one hard right (balance it with quiet phase-inverted version on the other side in order to keep mono-compatibility).

[risome]

I often use a filter delay with delay set to time L=1ms R=10ms this gives a nice wide sound with no apparent delay