Breathing Life Into Your Mix With Leapwing Audio StageOne

Last year I picked up a set of licences for Leapwing Audio’s RootOne, DynOne, CenterOne and StageOne. Headliner founder and editor-in-chief Paul Watson reviewed RootOne and really liked it, so I started using it almost immediately and came to the same conclusion. More recently, Headliner’s Adam Protz took a closer look at Leapwing’s recently released Al Schmitt Signature plugin and he was also very impressed. So it wasn’t long before I was using Leapwing Audio originals for various tasks, and all five are excellent.

Leapwing Audio is a fairly young company that prides itself on innovative audio plugins that didn’t previously exist. Aimed at the creative community, they set out to make tools that inspire creativity, are easy to use, and above all sound great. So good are they, it wouldn’t be unusual to find them in a mastering engineer’s processing chain as well as for individual channel and instrument enhancement. Particularly popular in both fields of engineering are RootOne and DynOne.

When it comes to mixing, the ‘One’ that is fast becoming my new best friend is StageOne. I feel we should all get to know more about this plugin, so I’m going to have another close look and find out what it’s capable of, and how easy it is to use.

Sound around us is received three-dimensionally. Placing instruments and voices in a stereo field from left to right is the easy part. Developing a perception of depth – how near and how far something is from you – was traditionally achieved with the use of volume and EQ; the quieter, less bright and deep a sound is, the further away it is perceived.

There’s also delay and reverb to help with a sense of depth and space. However if you’re looking for a more consistent and speedier way to build your mix that could reduce the need for multiple busses and short reverb presets, check this out.

Everyone Should Have One

StageOne is better described as three plugins in one. Each can be independently switched in and out, giving you a single or combination of audio manipulation tools within your soundstage. The three selections are ‘Width’, ‘Depth’ and ‘Mono Spread’ – all of which absolutely deliver in a way that you can clearly hear happening as you adjust each control. What’s equally impressive is the ease with which this happens, and the complete lack of phase issues or mono incompatibility.

The Width control has a value zero to 100 and opens out existing stereo, giving a much broader perception of the off-center audio while keeping the center audio intact. Alongside the Width control is a High Pass with a range from 20Hz to 500Hz, which lets you leave as little or as much low-end information unprocessed. This is particularly useful for retaining the mono presence of a kick drum for example while expanding the rest of the kit, making it seem larger and therefore closer to you.

The Depth control is likewise graded from zero to 100 and as you increase the amount, the perception is that the subject audio moves further back on the soundstage. This is a really quick and easy way to take an instrument or a backing vocal and place it, for example, mid-stage by the piano or keep the brass section upstage to the left of the drum kit.

Now this is not a concert hall amount of depth; it’s more akin to Abbey Road Studio 3 – but it’s those tight, transparent, right in front of you type of reflections that are so hard to accurately achieve in a reverb unit. In StageOne, Depth is easy to achieve with 100° of separation. Next to this is a handy tilt EQ, which will either enhance the low end and reign in the high frequencies at one extreme, or vice versa at the other. This is really useful for further enhancing the perception of, and the environment of, the space that the distance represents, whether it’s a bright space or a darker space.

The Mono Spread section is very clever and again very musical. The algorithm just seems to create a stereo image without any artefacts or phasing and it sounds beautiful. Then if you press the Mono button on your external mixer you get the exact same mono track back. The center gravity control is a pan fader, but even when fully left or right, never loses the perception or ghost reflections of a stereo image.

It’s a pleasure to see that StageOne is not particularly processor intensive, and that you can throw it on all sorts of tracks, from drums to big synth pads – with equally fabulous results. It’s also very easy to use all three sections together to create a stereo track and make it wider. You can then adjust from side to side, pan around and move back and forward on your soundstage at will without sacrificing mono compatibility.

I’ve pretty much used this plugin in every project over the last 10 months. On some projects, numerous instances of StageOne have been used. I’m already a fan, so it’s easy to write about a great plugin when it’s part of your regular workflow and has helped to speed various processes up. I am aware that a couple of mastering engineer friends of mine have also been taken with this amazing plugin and while I’m no expert in that field, it has cropped up in conversation that with some modern mixes where everything is louder than everything else, and constantly in your face, StageOne is very good at opening up a mix and giving that little bit of space required to bring it to life.

Conclusion

I’m still really impressed by the simple way in which the Mono Spread just magically transforms a mono track into a pseudo-stereo more effectively than trying to send it through a stereo room reverb, harmoniser etc., without getting anything close to the amazing transformation Leapwing’s StageOne will give you. The great thing about StageOne is it’s unique; I don’t know of anything that offers this level of soundstage manipulation in a single plugin, and as for the other Leapwing plugins, there are very few alternatives that come close.

I think the thing that has really inspired me to keep using this plugin again and again is its musicality. It really doesn’t matter what type of source audio you apply it to – it just makes things sound better. And it does so cleanly and without any of those nasty jarring sensations or frequency cancellations associated with phasing. Head over to the Leapwing website where you can get a fully functional 30 day trial for free.