In Metal, it is common to layer many guitar tracks, but how can you do this while still maintaining clarity? The Haas effect, also known as the precedence effect was introduced to us in 1949. With this technique, you can take a mono guitar track and give it the thickness of a stereo guitar track while maintaining clarity without any phase issues.
Turning a mono track to a Thick Stereo track with Haas Effect--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For this tutorial we will start off with 1 Guitar track, 1 Backing track:
Guitar Track:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10891235/Haas%20Effect%20Tutorial/%20WYN%20guitar%20track.wavBacking Track.:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10891235/Haas%20Effect%20Tutorial/%20WYN%20Backing%20track.wav --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Put the guitar track and the drum track from above into your DAW.
1)Start with your guitar track panned Center, sounds like this:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10891235/Haas%20Effect%20Tutorial/1%20Guitar%20Center.wavDoesn't sound too good, the mix sounds very weak.
2)Now duplicate your guitar track, looks like this:
Sounds like:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10891235/Haas%20Effect%20Tutorial/2%20Guitar%20Center.wavNow our guitar tracks simply sound louder, which isn't necessarily a good thing.
3) Now we move one of the guitar tracks 12ms to the right. This will give it the Haas effect sound.
Sounds like:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10891235/Haas%20Effect%20Tutorial/2%20Guitar%20Center%2012%20ms.wavSounds kind of phasy'ish. To fix this, we'll pan the guitars.
4) Now we pan one guitar track 100% left and the other 100% Right.
Sounds like:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10891235/Haas%20Effect%20Tutorial/2%20Guitar%20Center%2012%20ms%20panned%20L%20and%20R.wavHave a good listen to it. Now you have a full stereo sound. This is a very simple way to get a good sound.
so this whole tutorial in simpler words is: select, copy, paste, drag, pan, done. You can select how much delay ou want by moving the track back and forth but remember not to set the track more than 20 ms apart. This will be too much and will just sound blurry.
Enjoy