I think, the Digitone sound is a wide enough. I made a sound pack for DN, (with many wide evolving pads, stereo “analogish” bass…etc) and somebody told me, these sounds in some case may be too wide. There are some options to control wideness. LFO with Pan, beautiful reverb, stereo unison, and my personal favourite, the chorus effect. This chorus is very similar to mighty Roland Juno chorus. I am not a big fun of digital synthesizers, but the DN is an exception. Beautiful, clear and dynamic sounding synth. And wide 
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How do you compare wideness of the stereo field?
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts! Appreciated.
Another question that comes to my mind is… when you mentioned the panning on the device… I know only about three places where you can do something about it:
- chorus width
- delay wid parameter
- amp page pan parameter
The third one. If it is set to be at CEN then it is centered. OK, clear. But otherwise, you can only pan it to one side. How to spread the sound to both sides? Am I missing something? Thanks.
doesn’t seem that wide to me
Copy the sound to two tracks, pan one track left and one track right. Layer the two tracks.
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A technique that can sound good is assigning an LFO to Amp-Pan and making it super fast.
Depending on the other synth settings the effect can be a bit weird, so it doesn’t fit every sound. But sometimes it can be a nice stereo widening effect. Worth trying at least if you have an LFO to spare.
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A different technique that can be used for chords when programming the Digitone’s internal sequencer:
Say you have a four-note chord. Use two sequencer trigs moved together with microtiming so that they overlap, and have two notes on one trig and two on the other, with Amp-Pan P-locked in different directions.
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Maybe they’re talking about the synths ability to work within the stereo field, i.e. voice panning - rather than stereo widening effects, which have a different effect on the sound - you can’t fix that in post - that’s all I can think they’d mean as they’d know about chorus and hard panning channels. Puttin an LFO on pan isn’t a unique trick to the Digitone.
But that feels more like a stylistic choice, but it’s not neccessarily bad feedback, just subjective. Depends how much you trust their opinion in this case. I like using the Pan Spread on my Prophet, but I wouldn’t use it all the time, and putting a chorus on the mono output won’t give you anything close.
Sounds like you think it sounds fine though - so maybe let them know, and hopefully push on as you are 
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Digitone not wide enough? Try the Digitone Keys, it’s much wider.
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Two tricks you can try:
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Route an LFO to PAN. Set the LFO waveform to “Random” and Trig to “Hold”. Since the Digitone has polyphonic LFOs, this wil route each voice in a chord to different locations in the stereo field. Adjust amount to taste.
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Route LFO 1 to PAN. Set the LFO waveform to “Sine” and Trig to “Free”. This will cause each voice to sweep left-right in different locations in the stereo spectrum. Route LFO 2 to LFO 1 speed. Set LFO 2 waveform to “Random” and Trig to “Hold”. Now, each voice will be positioned at different locations and sweep left-right at different speeds. Each time you press a new chord, the individual LFO voice speed will be different from the last chord. Adjust LFO 1 speed, LFO1 amount and LFO2 amount to taste.
Both these tricks are dependent on the fact that the Digitone has polyphonic LFOs, and that the LFOs are set polyphonic by default. You can set the LFOs to basic Mono mode in the Sound setup menu (page 29 in the manual) if you want a traditional left-right sweep for the whole chord.
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As mentioned there are TONS of options in software to help increase stereo width.
A few to try in hardware:
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Copy one track’s sound to another track. Save each sound separately. Detune one down somewhere between -3 and -10 cents, and tune the other up the same amount. Pan one toward the left and one towards the right to taste. Boom, massive width. (This was a common trick used on old Yamaha FM synths like the TX81z.)
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I would take this a step further and make the envelopes, LFO amount/phase and other parameters slightly different for each track’s sound, so for instance a pad might swell faster on one side and and decay slightly longer on the opposite side. I typically save these next to each other like “SOUND X L” and “SOUND X R” to remember that they are variations to be used this way.
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If the above techniques make things TOO wide and queasy-feeling, pull each side a little closer to center and have both tracks being sent to a wider ping pong delay, and perhaps some reverb to tie it together.
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Another WAY simpler technique: run whatever you want to sound widen through a Boss Waza Dimension C pedal. Instant width and movement, plus only uses one DN track
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Also, combine these with a little bit of Nils’ LFO panning tricks above, along with stereo unison and chorus as needed.
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please elaborate.
You’ll start to introduce phase issues if not used correctly. Less is more when it comes to widening plugins but the apparent ear candy will make it sound more beneficial than it is. Always test your track in mono and you’ll see what I mean. Consider applying Haas effect technique instead
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So as a point of comparison I fired up the Prophet to play with the Pan Spread, I think this helps demonstrate the kind of width that’s possible with a poly synth that you can’t easily fix in post with a lot of these tricks.
This has no effects on it, just placing the different voices in the stereo field.
I might be way off the mark but I suspect this is what your friend is talking about.
The multi-track programming tricks (i.e. different notes on different tracks) seem like they’d be the best at spreading voices in this way, although less dynamic - it’s a cool creative idea either way that I’m going to play with.
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Too narrow or too wide (talking stereo image) is s totally subjective and contextual thing.
As an engineer, I’d rather work with a mono/narrow synth signal than a very stereo/wide one, to start with.
It’s definitely easier to widen the stereo field (just by duplicating the track and adding some delay/mod FX, then panning each track accordingly), than trying to reduce the width of a very wide signal and possibly incurring in phase issues.
Thank you for clarifying. I’m still a little unclear on what issues are being introduced. Isn’t stereo width defined by phase differences? Even the Haas effect employs phase differentials by using a delay in one channel. I am guessing some speakers will smash the two channels into a mono signal and you end up with phase cancellation and comb filtering?
This won’t result in a wider image until you start changing the sounds slightly
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Will possibly also result in phase cancellation in mono. And a lot of widening fx are based around the haas effect 
The opposed question by the engineer is a bit odd. It’s almost like asking why a single guitar recording is not wider. This is why multiple takes are often recorded and spread left and right for example. The same could be done with a pad from a synth.
Because it’s one element. It’s up to the producer and mixer to spread different elements in the stereo field using different techniques.
One technique that is quite effective to create a wide stereo image without too many phasing issues is by recording the pad twice but with slightly different settings and then hard pan left/right. Or in case of digitone as suggested before, copy the sound to a second track and use the layer function. But then change the second sound slightly.
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Maybe he just wasn’t expressing himself accurately and it was not about stereo width but the sounds in general. Synth sounds are totally a matter of taste and maybe he imagines different kind of sounds when thinking about synths… Don’t know. It’s certainly not a problem of the digitone. And since you are totally into your sounds your taste should matter here.
I would expect it to be the job of a mixing engineer to place them accurately in the stereo field and apply proper fx.
Or maybe double track them as @DaveMech suggested.
I‘m also not a fan of recording everything dry as a general rule. Many onboard fx or guitar pedals bring their own vibe to the table and may be an essential part of a sound
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