How to Use Voxengo SPAN: The Free Spectrum Analyzer Every Producer Needs

SPAN is a spectral analyzer. It's like reading the rings of a tree stump, you can tell how old it is. This tool will be your best friend. If you have a second monitor, keep this thing up on the second monitor at all times. Let me show you how to set it up.

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Prefer reading? Here's the full breakdown.

Setting it up

When you open SPAN, click into the settings:

• Block size: yours may be a different number, but let's set it to 4096. Block size is how detailed the graph will be. 4096 is a sweet spot.
• Average time: yours may be higher or lower, let's set it to 1400. The average time is like the release, it's how quickly the waveform will fall.
• Get out of the spectrum mode editor. Go up to the arrow next to the word routing and select mid/side stereo. Down here, make sure this little hamburger line says side, and set the color to whatever you want. I like blue because it's completely opposite of that salmon color.
• Last step: click on presets and click set as default. Now you never have to do that again.

Reading the correlation meter

In regards to the stereo field, let me tell you about the correlation meter:

• All the way to the right means it's completely in mono.
• At zero and to the right means you're in the stereo field in a healthy way.
• Zero and to the left means you have linear phasing, which is your worst enemy.

Let's play a few sounds and see what they look like on SPAN. This first sound is phasing at points. It's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's really important to understand what's going on with your sound. Now let's listen to a Reese. This looks pretty bad. When you're looking at SPAN and you see more sides than the mono signal, that often indicates phasing, which is really bad.

The fix: mid/side EQ

Here's a gem about mid/side EQing, because this is how we're going to fix that sound. Switch the mode from stereo to M/S. Once S is selected, that means we're only EQing the side signal, we're not touching anything in mono. If we want to get rid of this low-end stereo information, all we have to do is cut it out.

I like to do a low cut on the sides on almost every single thing. If someone sent me a track and said "hey, I want you to master this song," the first thing I would do is cut out the low end on the sides. It's the best way to make your sub punch through, and all of your low-end information punches through as well. It just works every time. So we'll do a cut here at about 160 Hz.

Now let's take a look at the Reese. It's like magic. This sound is no longer phasing. Very simple fix, and that covers mono and stereo information.