There is one major problem with that: psychoacoustic processing in the brain will not treat the resulting sound as "centred". Instead, it will be perceived to be coming from the side that has less delay. (This is called the precedence effect, though some people still call it Haas effect.)Pigfarmer Jr wrote: ↑Tue Mar 24, 2020 4:22 amActually, it can work there, too. Two tracks panned hard left and right. But the timing can't be too far off. Another trick is the Haas effect. Pan them both wide, nudge one track back 20ms (give or take 10 to taste) and then balance the volume. Works great on acoustic guitars.
To fix that you have two basic options:
a) Mix in the original signal panned centre, but cut by a few dB (-6 or even more). Then add one delayed copy in the left channel and another copy with a different delay in the right channel. The disadvantage is that the sound becomes even muddier due to now having three voices.
b) Put the original signal in the Mid channel and the delayed version in the Side channel (requires Mid/Side processing). This makes for a subtler but more balanced effect. Additional advantage: if someone downmixes your audio to mono, the processing mathematically cancels out.
My StereoPan VST plugin implements both approaches (and a low-pass filter if you use the (a) mode, to reduce high-frequency content on the centre copy of the signal and hopefully make it blend in a little better). Unfortunately I haven't looked at in ages, so it still only supports Windows and only 32-bit environments.
Finally, another great trick is to pan the two copies hard and apply a tiny pitch shift to one or both. This is another rather subtle effect, though, and not suited for making it sound like you have two guitars when you actually have one - it just makes your one guitar sound "wider".
