"Sweetening" soft synths, how do you do it?

[Vortex]

I just thought I would throw this out for comments.

 

I often find myself at the mixing stage, (in the box) trying to work softsynth tracks into the mix in clever ways. One of the things I try to do is push the high end out and back for an enhanced stereo field. I am not too impressed with the results I have acheived.

I am using Z3ta, FM7 and Absynth and using tube emulators, verbs and stereo wideners. I find the high end hard to "sweeten" on the soft synths. I am open to using outboard gear if there were effective enhancers.

How do you do it???

[DJDM]

That's interesting because in most of my mixes I tend to roll off the highend slightly using tape emulation. Otherwise I find a lot of bright synths tend to be a little too distracting in the mix.

For some native widening I often use very short ms delay panned to one side or the other on stereo instruments. Or some simple panning of various sounds.

I leave any post widening effects (if there are to be any) to my mastering engineer to do at that stage.

[RABid]

I'm probably just doing what you are already doing.

 

PSP Vintage Warmer to soften.

 

iZotope Ozone for spread, reverb, delay, etc. and giving VSTi's that massive, expansive Korg Triton sound. I use Ozone as an inline effect rather than a master. It REALLY eats the CPU's but it can turn a lifeless VSTi into a wonder.

 

For external digital VA's I sometimes run them through a tube preamp.

 

Robert

[Synthoid]

I've been using "Splenda" for my synth sweetening....

[Reverend Rhythm]

It tastes pretty good and has no calories. I guess it would best be used in a lot of current pop songs.

[Reverend Rhythm]

Seriously, I think rollong off the highs a little should help a lot, especilly if you have a number of digital synths.

[GTRBass]

One thing I most often do is to send my soft synths back to analog and through a Tube pre and opto compressor. I record them back in as a pair of tracks just as if I was recording a hardware device.

 

Another trick I've used is to put up a stereo pair of sm. dia. condenser mics in an XY setup and run my NI B4 back to analog, miking the monitors in the room. This gets blended with the direct sound, and definitely adds a airy "real" character. The same trick would work on other softsynth sounds as well.

[Mike Martin]

I run them through hardware!

 

http://www.ycpiano.co.kr/PIANO3/KSP8.jpg

[DJDM]

Originally posted by Mike Martin:

I run them through hardware!

Cheater!

[JeffLearman]

I like pitch shift doubling, but I'm disappointed with PSD plugins, which sound grainy and don't do what they should. For years I used an MXR digital PSD rack unit that I got cheap ($150) back in about 1983, until I loaned it to a guy who likes it so much he won't give it back. Being a dual-delay-line device, though, it isn't good for sustained high pitches (you hear the phase shift as it periodically cross fades between the two delay lines).

 

And so far I haven't even found good software to do pitch shifting as a post process -- but probably because I've limited my searches to free and cheap software. I guess this is just one item where cheap don't cut it!

 

To get an idea of the sound produced by pitch shift doubling (when done correctly), imagine the image you get from a stereo chorus -- the lovely big swirly image, where different frequency components go to different image locations and the whole mess rotates. Now imaging freezing that so there's no rotation. That's what PSD sounds like. It's great for processing a mono mix, it puts each instrument in a different place in the image, and mentally you can hear and isolate each part much better. (Great for trying to figure out who's playing what on those old jazz sides!)

 

It's also a great imaging device for single instruments, to help them fit in the mix without mushing into it completely.

 

I generally use an imaging effect with mid side technique. That is, the effect is added to left and subtracted (added inverted) to the right. That way, if the signal gets summed to mono, the effect disappears completely -- making it an imaging effect and not a coloration one. The same thing can be done with chorus.

 

This can be helpful to put a little life in artifical-sounding synth tracks. (PSD or stereo chorus.) For particularly cold ones I'll use the effect normally (rather than mid-side) or both ways, to add a little motion and warmth (a completely different kind of warmth than folks usually mean, such as tube saturation).

 

Of course, tube & tape saturation are also very cool. A little Ruby Tube plugin can help the tone of a synth.