Question about widening

[Fornicras]

Hi all,

Recently I made a song, even though I panned some of the instruments to left and right and used stereo wideners and chorus to make some of the sound wider, in the end the song still sounds not wide enough compared to other more "professional" songs.

What's the trick here?

And also, I want to ask another question about widening, in the master bus I use Ozone 10's stereo widener for bass, mid and high frequencies, and when I listen to the bands individually (with solo button) I hear them as normal but correlation meter is just below 0, but when I listen to all of the bands together, correlation meter is close to +1. Should I consider adjusting and checking the bands individually to make sure there are no phase issues or should I look at the meter when listening to all of them together?

Something else about the low end that boggles my mind is that when I hear some songs on Apple Music, I can clearly hear the bass (usually the reese bass) very wide that I can almost say it sounds like it's double-tracked to L, and R but when I try to widen my reese bass, correlation meter goes to -1. How do they do it?

[Benedict]

Howdy

Not being able to hear you song/mix means that no direct answer can be given. I will wonder if, in fact, your mix is not actually too W-I-D-E which means that there is no contrast - ie this one feels big because this one feels small. Perhaps the issue also about Depth. You can be as hard-panned as you like bit if the mix has no sense of depth, it feels flat or not engaging. You can hear A-Bs in here as well as how to mix for depth (which is an Artform not a technical thing):
https://youtu.be/YpPqsJR44Ns?si=XFS3vjaCQRxNsyzv

As for Widening, Don't is the best answer. I know others will howl at that answer but flummery cannot create a feel of anything but fakeness. Get a great mix and it will be a great master (provided you didn't hire a Fiverr Freddie who did nothing but what YouBoob Tipz n Trix Tutz before dealing himself a Pro).

You can, of course, look into how the human brain perceives sound (psycho acoustics) and learn how working at different parts of what is in the music space will have people feel things. The video talks about that to some extent but it it never a 2-minute thing.

[SOUND7_Brandon]

You could be experiencing frequency masking, making the tracks sound smaller due to the overlapping frequencies. Wideners are generally best used judiciously to avoid phase issues, so my guess is the problem lies elsewhere.