Have you ever done your own recording session where you grabbed your handheld recorder and recorded items around your house? Or perhaps you’ve gone on a day trip and recorded sounds outdoors? In any case, if you’ve had to deal with recording moving objects, you know it can be a challenge to keep the audio source in the center of the stereo field as it moves about. Whether that is car pass-bys, animals walking around, or you just misheld your recorder, fixing and centering the audio source in post can be a pain in the butt, but not with ReCenter!
What is ReCenter?
As the name implies, ReCenter is a plugin that automatically centers the stereo image of your audio file. That’s basically it. It’s a really specialized tool that just works as you’d want and expect it to. Just insert it as an insert effect on your audio track and voila. Couldn’t be easier.
What is ReCenter best for?
Personally, I have found it a great time saver for directional effects such as drive-bys and whooshes. I also use it a lot just to make sure my sound effects are always centered (when I want them to be). I find it especially useful when layering different effects together that have different directionalities. With ReCenter, I can route all layers to a single bus and make sure they are all centered and sounding as one cohesive sound.
I’ve also found the mid-side decoder (MS Input) a handy tool for being creative in reversing the mid-sides. Sometimes you can get some cool effects. Also, it is nice to have an MS decoder if you don’t already have one. It will get the job done.
What can ReCenter do?
Apart from the obvious, as previously mentioned, ReCenter comes with an MS decoder that can be activated with the click of a button.
It also comes with a mono filter. You could think of this like a low pass filter that makes any frequency below the set frequency mono. This is super useful for controlling and centering the bass frequencies of an audio source.
You can adjust the width and the pan of the audio source using the horizontal faders just below the visualizer. This is great for placing audio sources in specific locations in the stereo field. I have found this quite indispensable as a sound design tool when working on cinematics and needing to place sound effects in very specific locations.
With the intensity knob, you can set the amount of stereo correction you would like. This can be anything from 0, which is no correction, to 100, which is a fully centered image, and even reverse the image (change the left channel to the right and vice versa) with the knob all the way up to 200.
How to use ReCenter creatively? (creature vocal technique)
I’m sure there are many ways of using ReCenter as a creative tool, but one way I have found to use it creatively is with vocals, dialogues, and creature sound effects. The method is as follows:
- Duplicate the track that holds your line of dialogue. You should now have 2 identical tracks.
- Place one track on the right channel and one track on the left channel.
- Design and insert your desired effects on each individual channel (they do not need to be the same effects)
- Group the left and right channels back together into a group bus
- Insert ReCenter on the group bus and notice how it treats the audio.
Now, you may think, isn’t this just the same as keeping both channels as stereo channels and processing them the same way? Surprisingly, no, it isn’t! ReCenter’s algorithm somehow manages to blend the left and right channels differently and you can come up with unique results.
*Note: Click the MS Input to check if it gets you better results. Don’t be fooled by the increase in volume however.
Pros
- Super simple, super easy to use
- Works right out of the gate. No need to fiddle around with parameters to get good results
- Nice visualizer that even shows the movement of the left and right channels of the original audio source
- Easily place your audio in the stereo field with the angle and width
- MS input and multiband option for more accurate recentering
Cons
- Having a mix knob would have been nice for design purposes
- Having a gain match option (especially for using the mid-side) would also be handy. Right now the MS Input slightly increases the gain of the audio by about 3dB.
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Is it worth $85 USD?
ReCenter is a tool that does one thing, but it does that one thing really well. I was never aware of how awful the stereo image of some of my sound design was prior to getting this plugin. Just getting it and using it opened my eyes to this issue and has improved the quality of my work. For that reason alone, the price tag has been worth it for me. Not only that, but this plugin has found its place alongside my most used plugins for sound design.
If you are in the world of sound design, then you are probably in a similar situation where this plugin could significantly reduce post editing time and increase the quality of your work, but that is a decision you will have to make for yourself.
Do you use ReCenter? What are your thoughts about it?
Comment below!
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