Let's start off with one track, it's panned in the center. [MUSIC] We'll create a second track, we'll move that first track down to the second track and copy it. They'll both be heard in the phantom center. [MUSIC] If we pan one to the left and one to the right, we will still hear them in the phantom center. [MUSIC] I will shift one of the tracks by 20 milliseconds, it's currently leaving at 607 I'm going to move to 627. Here's the shift. We can see the shift happen. And we will listen to the 20 millisecond shift between the two tracks. [MUSIC] Interesting concept. This is stereo widening. This is not how I would do stereo widening. The way I would do this, let me delete this track. The way I would do this would be to go into my mix window. Let's listen to our solo vocal in the center, once again. [MUSIC] I'm going to create a new aux track and it's going to be mono. Across this aux track, I will place a delay unit, it will be a mono delay. And on this mono delay, I will dial in a very, very short time. Let's see, what's the shortest time I can get? One millisecond. Let's pan our original track left. I'm going to mute my delay for a second. [MUSIC] Now the input to my delay unit will be, Bus 5. And the send, from my original track, will be Bus 5. When I bring this fader up, I'll be introducing the original signal into the delay. Let me pan my delay to the opposite side. So, remember that 20 seconds of delay that I created? Let's see what happens if I listen to one millisecond of delay. I've got zero feedback, one millisecond of delay, I'm going to introduce the delay as I move forward. [MUSIC] So at one millisecond, I can hear the vocal spread a bit, it's still leaning a lot to the left side. Let's introduce that 20 milliseconds on our delay unit and listen to the vocal now. [MUSIC] This is artificial widening, this is how I would spread a vocal. If someone gave me a pair of vocals, and let me get another note here. One, two, three, four. So this is a different note. Let's listen to this note. I'll mute my aux. I'll put this back to the center. And listen to these two vocals both in the center. [MUSIC] Now if those were the only backgrounds that I had to work with, I could potentially take those backgrounds and do something very similar to what l did in the last section. We'll create an aux input, so this first aux input we will call it our wide track, our widening track. The second aux will be pgcombined which is going to, it's not really a great name but we'll use that for right now. The input of my background vocals will come into this track as Bus 6. So background vocal one and background vocal five will both come out of their tracks Out of Bus 6 and be heard in the bgcombine track. Let's listen to that. [MUSIC] When I hit M, I'm actually muting them, so you can see that they're both coming to that one track. [MUSIC] Now I will move my zen to my delay from that first vocal to the combined track. So combined track will now be sending information through this fader to my stereo doubling unit. So, I'll pan the combined track. [MUSIC] I will open up my delay track with a 20 milliseconds on it. I'll bring the zen fader down. [MUSIC] It's kind of got a pingy sound to it, so let's go down to ten milliseconds and see what that sounds like. [MUSIC] It sounds a lot tighter. Let's go down to five milliseconds and see what that sounds like. [MUSIC] Still wide. Let's go down to three milliseconds and see what that sounds like. [MUSIC] Let's go down to two milliseconds and take a listen, whoops, not 32. We'll go down to two milliseconds and take a listen. [MUSIC] Now we'll go down to one millisecond and listen. [MUSIC] It's still leaning to the left, but that illusion of something occurring on the left and something occurring on the right, is still there. This is artificial widening. You can do it with one track or several tracks if you use the parallel busing concept that I did with the background combined track. Artificial widening is used on background vocals in R&B, guitars in rock and roll on just about everything in dance music and EDM. It is an image I hear when I listen to a successful record. Just about everything I hear that has reached the top of the charts, has some type of widening on it, whether it's natural or artificial. As a vocal producer, you can create with natural widening in the studio, or create with artificial widening in the mix down process. Let's take a look at more.