Taking a Mix from Good to Great with Spatial Imaging | By Joey Sturgis
Spatial imaging is a part of mixing that rarely gets talked about directly, and it’s easy to understand why. Who listens to a mix and immediately follows up with “Wow, the spatial imaging in that was insane”? If we could only be so lucky…
Instead, we focus on the elements that make up that space. We talk about things like width, depth, and size – all of which are elements of spatial imaging. Here are just a few of the ways that spatial imaging can elevate your mix:
Larger Than Life Sounds
Your sound doesn’t have to be loud to be huge. When something isn’t standing out in a mix, a lot of engineers dive for the volume or gain. Doing this again and again throughout a mix does nothing but push you further into the red and risks clipping your output.
Instead, mess around with stereo imaging. There are tons of approaches to transform a wimpy sounding mono source into a killer stereo sound. Rather than reaching for a compressor the next time a guitar part is falling flat, maybe grab a time-based plugin (reverb, delay, chorus, etc).
Everybody’s got a different approach to stereo imaging depending on what they’re trying to accomplish. We recently had Dan Korneff (Paramore, The Devil Wears Prada, Papa Roach) on the URM Podcast, where he shared his unique approach to using a stereo widener on guitars. Instead of the traditional approach of adding the widener on his guitar bus, Dan runs the widener in parallel, allowing him to tweak the EQ on his widened tracks while retaining the original sonic imprint of the guitars.
My approach is always slightly different depending on the track I’m working with, but I share a ton of my most-used methods in my latest course.
Finding the Third Dimension
Don’t let staring at your flat computer screen dictate your mixes. Use your ears to decide what needs more depth.
One of the greatest things about mixing in stereo is our ability to create 3D sound. Early on (we’re talking the Recording Stone Age), engineers would require giant rooms to move musicians around a single microphone to create depth. Now we have reverbs to create space around each instrument. We can pan the instrument around in digital space until it sits just right. What used to take hours of painstaking trial and error is now available at a few clicks of a button.
Perhaps the coolest tweak we can make to widen a sound – we can use delay to create width. All you need to do is duplicate a track, pan each on opposite sides, and then nudge it forward.
Not to the point of creating an echo, but enough to create a simulated reflection. We’re talking about nudging it by milliseconds. A change so small, it’s nearly impossible for untrained ears to hear. Try starting around the 10-30 ms range; too much and it’ll start sounding more like an echo. You’ll love how effective this can be at helping something like a guitar solo punch through a dense mix.
Tricks & Treats
I’m a huge fan of moving elements around a mix. Being able to take an element you hear on the left and having it whizz past you to the right? It’s awesome. But what if I told you that nothing moved at all?
With spatial imaging, things like automating a pan or reverb are tricking you into hearing motion. All that’s really going on is the volume decreasing in one speaker while it increases in another. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be some big secret, but it’s tricking your ears into hearing movement.
To the end listener, these moving elements are usually a treat, keeping them interested in a way that a static mix just can’t.
Spatial Imaging Comes in Clutch as Your Last Resort
Spatial imaging can be a frustrated engineer’s best friend. Maybe you’ve gone through your toolbox, throwing every EQ, compressor, saturation & gain plugin you’ve got at a problem sound that won’t budge. You just need something to push it through the mix without sticking out like a sore thumb.
Small tweaks like applying a stereo widener to other elements can make room for that sound to breathe. Adding a bit of delay can replicate early reflections; once again tricking a listener’s ear into thinking something is closer to them than the original sound would have been.
The possibilities of spatial imaging are unique in that you’re already using them in your mix (even if you’re not taking advantage of them). Every track in your DAW has a pan knob on it, right? Are you able to duplicate those tracks? Route them mono-to-stereo and vice-versa?
Start messing around with the basic elements, and it won’t be long before you start to realize how much more powerful your stock DAW is than just something you capture audio in. If you’ve already played with panning til you’re blue in the face, experiment with time-based effects and how they interact with these concepts.
Want to see how I’m using Spatial Imaging to hack my mixes?
I go into much more detail about this subject in my Spatial Imaging Fast Track course, where I not only cover spatial imaging, but some of the ways I’m using it on every element of my mixes. I’ll show you my favorite tricks and give you the reasons behind them, available exclusively to our URM community. Check it out!
For more awesome tips on becoming a better producer, head on over to the URM Academy blog , subscribe to our podcast , and join our mailing list.
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