Ever since digital delays were introduced back in the analog days, a great trick for making a mono track into stereo is to introduce a Haas Effect delay. The Haas Effect is a psychoacoustic technique where a delay less than 40 milliseconds is not heard as a distinct delay, so panning it to one side with the dry signal to the other side makes a mono track sound very stereo. In a DAW you can just use a simple delay plugin for this, but Fiedler Audio has taken this technique to a whole new level with its new Splat plugin.
Splat does much more than add a delay and pan it to one side, as it combines numerous parameter controls to precisely place the track in the stereo soundfield while keeping it in phase. Once of the problems with performing psychoacoustics tricks is that they might sound great in stereo, but tend to cause phase problems when played back in mono. Splat has a few ways to keep these phase problems to a minimum.
The Controls
The main control in the center is called Splat. If you turn it to the left, the right channel gets delayed up to 30ms, and vice versa. Behind Splat is the Depth control, which adds feedback to the delay.
A Flavor control on the top left allows you to change the phase, which enables you to change the perceived direction of the sound. On the top right is the Spread control, which allows you to adjust the level of the delayed side based on the amount of splat. Negative values lower the volume of the delayed side and positive values raise the volume so it counteracts the panning done by the delay. Below each of these controls are phase buttons.
More On The Bottom
On the bottom of the plugin is a section that can look at a Filter, LFO, or the Stereo spread, depending upon which button you select.
When Filter is selected, it shows high and low pass filters that can be adjusted with the green handles. You can also select the slope for each filter using the buttons on each side. In this mode, an frequency analyzer will show you a spectral representation of the signal with the filter settings.
The LFO section allows you to select the Speed, Amount, and LFO waveform. If Sync is off, you can set the LFO frequency in Hz. If sync is on, the frequency is based on musical notes and the BPM value to the left. The sync function enables you to set the speed of the LFO in sync with the tempo of your song in your DAW.
Finally, the Stereo section has a mid/side knob on the left which lets you fine tune the overall stereo width. There’s also a Pan control if you feel the need to control the panning like in a DAW, with a phase correlation meter in the center to make sure that your settings are mono-compatible.
The Fielder Audio Splat plugin is available from Plugin Alliance for an introductory price of just $49 (normally $99). You can find out more here, or watch the video below for more info and some audio examples.
