Make Things Wider By Making Them Mono

Ever since stereo records came out in the 1960s people have been trying to get their mixes to sound as wide as possible. People think that having all their tracks recorded in stereo means that their mixes will be guaranteed to be wide, but that's usually the opposite of the way things turn out. If you're guitars are panned hard left and hard right, and so are your pianos and drums and everything else, then there's no contrast in your mix. Everything is in both speakers and the ear has trouble separating your mix.

Contrast can come from many different avenues, and taking mono sources and panning them around is one of the easiest and best ways of creating contrast in a mix. If you are given source files that are all stereo, make sure they're truly stereo, and not just a stereo track. If the source isn't truly stereo, consider throwing away one side and panning the remainder to help it sit in the mix or stick out of the mix. You could also use any number of plugins to reduce the stereo width of a track. Most plugins that aim to widen the stereo field can also reduce the stereo field, so don't think of them as one-trick ponies. Confining the stereo width of an instrument can help you place it in a specific area of the stereo spectrum.

Quickly Hide Tracks in Large Pro Tools Sessions

When working in very large sessions, it can be very easy to get lost in the sheer number of tracks. In a post-production mixing environment there are usually lots of tracks being routed to many different subgroups and output summing assignments. I have a template that I've set up for working in 5.1 surround sound, and you can see a glimpse of the mix window above. As you can see, there are 141 tracks in the session. While I may not use all of them, the template is set up with that number because it's not uncommon to end up somewhere near that many tracks. Daunting, yes, but with color coding and a clear naming scheme you can quickly get your orientation. Here's a little tip to quickly hide all the tracks you don't want to see, which is very useful when you've done all your editing.

Here's a look at some Dialogue tracks, and you can see that they're all summed through the Dia ∑ aux track that lives at the end of the mix window, along with summing auxes for all SFX, Music, and Atmosphere tracks. If you are using newer versions of Pro Tools you can right click on the output assignment, and click Show Only Assigments To... This will hide (but still enable) all tracks that aren't a part of the signal chain for that assignment.

This will allow you to see only Dialogue tracks, any Dialogue reverb tracks, and the Dialogue summing aux track. Because I like to keep all my summing auxes at the end of the session, I can have the best of both worlds: I can see how everything is coming together when I scroll to the end of the session, or using this tip I can focus on every aspect of the Dialogue all on the same part of the screen. Of course, this also works in the Edit Window, allowing me to dive deeper into editing whatever I feel is needing some work.

View fullsize

To get back to where you started, just right click on the output assignment again and select Restore Previously Shown Tracks.

Another aspect of this tip is that if you're using aux tracks to sum all of your audio, you can quickly focus on fine-tuning the final pieces at the summing stage while keeping an eye on the final output.

As you can see, I have all my final summing auxes next to my final output aux and my print track. These are at the end of my session, and are tracks 134 through 139. With two clicks I can go from that to seeing only those tracks, which are now tracks 1-5.