Widener? Early Reflections?

That waves plug you are using has the early reflections included in its algorithm. You'd need to consult the manual but I know it does it and I know some of the parameters affect the ERs, I just don't remember which ones.

The widener moves things to the extremes of the stereo picture. The best way to get what it does is to play around with one. Not sure if Logic has one, I use a different DAW. It should have it, but if it doesn't iZotope has the Ozone Imager plugin which is free and does exactly that.

 

Waves S1 is a widener. Also VSL Imager Pro. They both do essentially the same thing and let you adjust the stereo field width.

 

Mike sets up early reflections in two different ways. One way for center panned instruments (woodwinds) is to use a normal convolution reverb ER, in his case Altiverb.
I would recommend you go with Breeze2, Altiverb is expensive and slows CPU though great sounding.
For left and right panned instruments Mike uses his own "fake" early reflection setup. I have never seen it done by anyone else but it works wonders.
What you do is you delay either the left or right audio channel using a plugin. Mike uses a protools stock plugin. Alternatively you can use Voxengo delay VST since it is free (if you do not have protools).
By delaying left or right you get what is known as a Haas delay. The brain is tricked into believing that the audio comes from the direction that it hears first, EVEN if the audio level from both left and right directions stays the same and EVEN if the audio level from the delayed direction is at a slightly higher volume (you can experiment). The longer the delay the more panned the instrument appears. I am not sure about the instruments pan position before going into the delay - I myself uses tree mics (stereo) so I just leave them center. If you use a mono close mic you might need to pan before going into the delay, not so sure about that...

Sterero Widening is another concept, you can use a stereo imager to change the perception of the width of the stereo feel. So if you want a "narrower" sound field you can decrease the width, in the end making it MONO. It is important to use stereo wideners throughout your chain, so that you can control the width of solo instruments as well as instrument groups and all instruments together. One thing to note - you can only widen the stereo field to a certain point before it starts to sound very bad. My experience with Waves S1 is to never go above 1.25.

Then there is the mid-side EQ. Using an EQ split like this you can increase either the mids or the sides. Read the manual for your EQ.
In this way you can also affect the stereo field. So when Mike takes out frequencies in the MID he makes the instrument sounds wider.
Waves has a plugin called Center. With this you can easily volume control the mid and side information. Super useful.

I also do a left-right channel split of the EQ since then I can control the Haas-ER delayed channel, filtering it out a bit. You can also do M/S and L/R EQ processing of your reverbs. Using Mike's multi-verb setup I find myself also starting to pan reverbs. I also use a final "glue" reverb on the stereo mix. I also delay the signal going into other reverb channels - so e.g. the trombones send to the horn and woodwinds reverb is delayed (as it would be in real life).

I hope that Mike will take more time to demonstrate his setup. Also since many people do not know Protools.
Diagrams can also be drawn demonstrating an audio path.
Eventually when we start to make sense of it all we can help and inspire each other, demonstrating our individual signal paths and new discoveries.

 

When using Haas delay for panning what can you do about comb filtering? Also the correlation meter stays on negative values for the most time. Is that ok?

 

When using a lot of delay it should be less of a problem, maybe use more ? With these kind of questions we would need a DSP expert of some sort to answer it.
So far I've only used HW brass tree stereo mics and it sounds great. I would also like to know more about how to solve that issue with close mic setup. But Mike is also using room mics in his video for the brass section.
Are there even a brass library with great sounding close or mid mics, besides samplemodeling ?