How to achieve wide warm stereo effect like Kenny Beats Denzel Curry

kevlukchurst

New member
Hi all - I'm looking to achieve the wide / warm stereo master effect in this Denzel Curry Kenny Beats "Track 07" but haven't been able to get close to it.

I've been trying various stereo expansions / delays / soundtoys microshifts etc but no dice.

Does anyone have any tips of how to get this sound (in the box)? Or is this a high end hardware effect?


Thanks :)

FP wont let me link as im new, but the track is here

youtube.com/watch?v=lF4e-f3fN_U&list=OLAK5uy_lPkAkbbzC2B77cKVcp3RnMCLl4Yggz0YQ&index=7



 
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So it sounds to me like good usage of the stereo field as well as some solid stereo processing.

The drums are real wide- How I usually get this effect is to bus out my drum group and throw a puigchild from waves on it for side chain compression. You can compress the mid and sides separately and adjust their amplitude independently as well. From there, make sure you are panning your instruments in effective locations so that they don't fully "touch" each other.

If you have a mid/side eq, use it. Lo pass the sides of the entire mix up to about 100hz or so- this will make it feel wider almost instantaneously. Then you can bump the high end up slightly on the sides (be careful here- you can overdo it very easily) to accentuate the sides and give contrast to the center. Contrast is what the ear uses to judge sounds- use it well!


Lastly, on your "master" you will need some type of stereo imaging plug. Izotope has one for free that works very well. You will have a tendency to go too far with the stereo spread on these at first- resist that urge.. It doesn't actually sound as good as you are hearing it the first few times.


As far as warmth, get a good saturation plug in. NLS from waves is dirt cheap right now and is a truly great little plug-in and worth more than it's price tag says.

Hope this helps
 
Thanks for the tip mate, great - I got BX Digital which is really effective at M/S EQ - also layering different states of widening, as you touched on, seems to get close to the effect, with a good dose of saturation. Ill check out NLS....


Much appreciated
 
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Theres a few things that i would suggest.

Slapback delays (Pretty sure thats the main force behind his stereo width)
Dimension expanders
Short Reverbs
parallel chorus effects
waves PS22 stuff (omfg is this good and slept on)
Doublers
I know kenny uses the PanMan so he will just pan everything about. He even said in a live stream a while back he rarely keeps his sounds centered or mono.
Izotope Imager 2. (this uses velvet noise convolution so it wont fuck your phase or mono compatibility too much)
Haaz effect


EDIT
Also RC-20 has some good analoge styled stereo fucker-y. It's a slight discourse between the left and right channel. (you can always use most stock panning effects on the noise LFO shape with a low rate and like 5-10% depth.
 
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There are a lot of misguidance around the internet about stereo width so be warned and also be very careful as it can have mass effect on your mono signal. - good stereo width is not a plugin, its technique into how you use the session, mixing into from the start a width program wont give you wide mixes, but simply using a good M/S technique however will. - no-one can show you this as its a art form all in itself, but for arguments and example reasons only. - if you take the bottom end out of the SIDES, and take some of the HIGH end out of the Mono signal then this will automatically create a wider effect. (global) - what you then need to do is within the mix itself add textures using pingpong, mono>stereo delays/verbs and generally have movement in the tracks..

As said, be careful with width stuff, it can instant kill a mix. - and you think it sounds better as your now hearing your mix differently. but actually if that's the case you already gone WAY too far...
 
There is obviously a lot of phase trickery going on in that track. Way too much in my opinion. The phase issues are so massive that it almost makes me nauseous listening to it. There are a billion different ways to get that kind of sound and it all depends on what you start with. The thing is that you have to be careful when you start pushing M/S stuff (a lot of stereoizing plugins incorporate some kind of M/S under the hood; I just usually do it manually) where if you go too far everything kind of folds back on itself and you get that nauseating out-of-phase sound. If the sides relative to the center is more than +6dB, you will get problems. Those problems can sound really cool, but it gets old FAST.
 
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