Faking depth and stereo separation?

Question

I recently ripped a live performance of a song which I really liked.

I was converting the ripped song to an appropriate format, intending to title it and plaster a alternate cover art on it when I thought to myself, was there a way to make it sound better?

Now, I am no sound engineer. I am sure with higher end tools and proper setting, a good live recording can be attained, as evident by all the live albums out there. But for a home user like myself armed with a simple software like Audacity, is there a way to fake the sound stage/stereo separation of a track?

While I am not looking to get a perfectly recorded stereo track, I am keen to know if there are little tweaks that will make a track sound cleaner without introducing too much noise or excessive removal of a track's dynamic range.

Answer 1

It depends on what you mean by “cleaner” really. Is this a professional or amateur recording? If you just want to improve the recording, then there are many things you can try. EQing to get a better sound is probably the easiest. Stereo separation can be added or increased by using subtle stereo effects like chorus, delays and reverb or adding a slight distortion effect to the whole mix, then setting slightly different parameters for left and right. Remember that the lower frequencies are usually centred, and the higher frequencies are widened.

I've “restored” or improved bad cassette recordings. After the unwanted noise removal, I do things like split the spectrum up into four bands, adding relevant effects to each band and specialized stereo enhancement effects to the higher frequencies and reinforce and tighten the lower frequencies. In the end, I have about 15 stereo and mono tracks, with crazy routing between them. With this many tracks, you have to be well aware of phase issues and how to handle them. There's no reason you can't do this but on a smaller scale using Audacity. It depends on how much time you want to spend on it really.

There are many free vst plugins out there that you could use. They may not be as good as some of the specialized plugin suites, but you're only doing this for personal reasons.

Some simple things you can try is adding compression to the lower end to tighten it up, and adding some reverb to the top end to make it feel more spacey. You can then use EQ to bring out the frequencies you like and maybe enhance the midrange. Give it a try and see how it sounds. But if you have no clue what you are doing, you may find that you'll get lost pretty quickly and need to spend some time on it.

Answer 2

My favorite approach is to force spread with a spring reverb with short decay. Set as a send/return to dial in how much you add... THEN play with mid/side eq. Gives you some nice width to work with.

I use valhalla ubermod.

Answer 3

Click on the name of the track and from the drop down menu select "Split Stereo to Mono"

Pan the top channel 70% left. Pan the bottom channel 70% right.

Click the beginning of the wavelength area for the bottom channel so the pointer points to the right. It's important to get the very beginning of the field.

Click "generate", select "silence" and set the last 3 digits for 005 (all the rest are also zeros).

CTRL-A to select entire track > Export.

Play around with the silence - anything from (last 3 digits) 005 to 030 sounds decent depending on your preference. More than that creates an echo.

Old thread, but hopefully this helps someone. I've "remastered" many mono concert recordings into simulated stereo using this technique.

Rocknrollchuck