Narrowing of prepanned virtual instruments

[jamieboo]

Hello folks

I'm working on a big, dense, orchestral thing at the moment and I'm trying to find ways I can improve the clarity of the piece.
I'm confident that the orchestration is reasonably good so I'm wondering what else I can do.

I use EW Hollywood Orchestra Diamond which is apparently correctly panned out of the box. I'm tinkering with the narrowing of the stereo fields (using the stock narrowing plugin in Cubase) of instruments to help with spatial focus and I just want to understand things better.

What happens if I narrow, for example, the brass bus? That bus includes some instruments panned a bit to the left and some to the right. So does it not really make sense to narrow a bus that includes individual instruments spread across the stereo field?

So does it make more sense to narrow individual instruments?
What happens if I narrow the harp for example? It's already panned hard left, so what effect does narrowing have? Is the narrowing 'symmetrical'?

Is this something that people generally do with orchestral samples or am I digging for complications I don't really need?

Thanks

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[JeffvR]

I'd recommend Mike Verta's class about template balancing. He says stereo field is just icing on the cake. If composition + orchestration is good it should sound good, even in mono.

 

[dgburns]

I do this all the time. I especially narrow the close mics.

 

[muk]

Experiment and see what you do and what you don't like. However, I would be careful with reducing the stereo width on sources that have ambience baked in. The reverb part of the signal gives the aural cues about the width and size of the room it has been recorded in. If you narrow it artificially you alter these cues to something that may (or may not) sound bad. On a dry signal that is much less of a problem.

Sounds from close up have a wider stereo field, sounds from further away a more narrow one. If you want to make a source that has been recorded from close up sound further away, one thing to do is to narrow the stereo width. If you have several mic positions, you can use less close mic and more of the room mics. For dry libraries (like Sample Modeling, VSL etc.) you will want to narrow the stereo signal to push them back.

That being said, separating instruments in a mix can help to achieve better clarity. But you'd likely want to check for clashing frequencies as well. Decluttering those frequencies might do a lot to clear up the mix.