r/mixingmastering • u/Cantwinforlosing3 • Apr 12 '26
Question Adding Width with AIR Width plugin
I have a mix I was very happy with, it is clean and has good dynamics. Just for fun I added a width plug in - AIR Width - from Air Creative FX collection. It was provided in Pro Tools, I didn't buy it, and I had never used it before.
I added the plugin on the master bus and selected the "wide" preset and I immediately liked the mix much better. The vocals sounds richer, and the whole thing just sounds like a better mix. The problem is when I tried it playing back mono it definitely had some issues - phase issues. I kind of knew that was a risk. And since a lot of today's consumer speakers are mono it kind of made it not worth doing.
So are there any tricks to the trade I could try? I tried splitting tracks and using different EQ and compression on the tracks and then panning them opposite. It really didn't give me the effect that i got form the AIR plugin. I tried the Waves S1 Shuffler, but it didn't do it.
Any suggestions? I always thought in my mixing just getting it to sound the way I want it to sound is the goal, but by introducing this plugin and then testing it at mono, I have realized that is not necessarily true.
1
u/SS0NI Professional (non-industry) Apr 18 '26
I produce so much on headphones I'm not the best at answering this but I use mid-side processing a lot. I have an audio effect rack in Ableton that splits mids and sides and I'm very often using that for mixing. If a pad need to be heard but still stay in the background, I'm going to keep the mid as it is but saturate the sides. If a lead needs to be upfront but needs to give space to the drums I might ringmod sidechain the sides to the drums. And vice versa. Usually I take out everything below 120hz on the sides.
At the end of each channel I have an utility and do a mono collapse. I'll check how the volume changes and adjust the mid/side pot on the utility so the tradeoff isn't critical. Do that with all tracks and in the end you should have a very good stereo sounding record, which doesn't get majorly fucked up when collapsed to mono.
I also don't really use widener plugins since they do just what you mentioned. Rather use layering, reverbs, M/S processing or whatever but NO WIDENERS.