Opinions on LCR panning

charlie morgan

New member
Whats your opinions on LCR panning?
Im just curious to what others think of the technique, personally I think its greats and gives alot of space in the mix for the vocals and other main instruments.
 
Interesting thread topic!

First things first. Pan law in Pro Tools works like this: You have -2.5 dB, -3 dB, -4.5 dB and -6 dB pan law options. By default -3 dB is selected. For stereo tracks pan law has no effect. A stereo track that is panned hard L is at 100% gain, when either side is panned to center, the panned side's level is attenuated by -3 dB, which is perceived as a -19,4% drop in loudness. For mono tracks pan law has an effect and the effect is: For hard panned L or R, the mono track is at 100% gain. If the pan law is set at -3 dB and the mono track is at 100% hard L panning, then if the pan knob is set at center the mono sound source has -3 dB level change compared to the previous position and is now sent 50% 50% to both sides. So the amount of dB the pan law is set to attenuate by, that much signal is attenuated at the center pan position. The pan law has an effect when you touch the pan knobs. (Pro Tools) If you have the pan law at a certain setting and then change it and you don't touch the pan knobs, you'll have no impact, the state of the pan knobs must be updated for the new pan law to kick in. Yes, this means that nasty gain staging issues can occur in the middle of the project when these settings slowly morph into the mix as you touch the pan knobs on the mono tracks for the first time after a pan law change, so watch out for that. (Pro Tools)

Now that we know that the pan knobs are speaker volume knobs with a gain behavior dictated by the type of input track (stereo/mono) and by the pan law setting, we can discuss the impact of LCR panning.

Hard panning/LCR panning is a great default pan setting, because it means all of these sound sources are left unattenuated. The same about -2.5 dB pan law - it messes up the gain staging on each side as little as possible. Placing all pan knobs at the center position, means all sound sources have already gone -3 dB into the noise floor relative to the speaker level they were recorded at. So from a gain staging perspective LCR panning makes sense. But hard panned sound sources are extremely far out to one side and very close to the ears. The wrong frequencies and gain level here, such as a bad hi-hat sound, can really mess up a mix.

One of the reasons why LCR panning in combination with dual mono tracks makes sense, is because it allows the scope of the L and R mixes to remain intact when you mute the non-hard panned sound sources or when you have them unmuted but don't touch their gain, meaning there is no bleed in between them when you work on each L or R mix. So this means you can improve the sound of the L mix without destroying the balance you've set on the R mix, and that's gold! Many mixes out there have very messy L and R mixes and part of the reason is that LCR panning was not used. If you want your mixes to sound great, you need to know exactly what's going on, on each side and have each in really good balance individually and together with the other side. A/B them with perception management, to get an idea of how important this is.
 
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It's a good way to make everything feel wide, but that's the problem -- everything is wide. Especially when you want your drums to be punchy but not centered at the same time. Hard panning drums loses so much of it's punch but keeping it dead centre will mask the kick/snare a little. Just stereo widen some sounds occasionally that sound nice with a stereo delay, instead of hard panning everything left or right.
 
I think it's a gimmick.

My take is that good mix engineers do whatever is necessary to make something work. As a result some percentage of tracks are made to work successfully using something like LCR panning. Then a combination of internet forces detect that some successful projects are that way and jump to the backwards conclusion by seeing a 'pattern' in the tracks the happen to pick out. Hey presto you have a fad.
 
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it's not new nor is it really a fad - listen to the earliest Beatles stereo recordings and you hear LCR panning at work, many others from the same period also applied LCR as the technique for creating their stereo sound stage

It has resurgence every so often as new engineers discover the idea and take it for a spin
 
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It's not a gimmick or a fad. Lots of mixing engineers have worked this way for a long time (and in the early days, it was the ONLY option as there were no pan pots; only switches). It's just that as audio forums and a wave of home recordists have suddenly been able to afford to get into recording over the past decade, it's being talked about among the masses of amateurs who had no clue that this was a common method of mixing... so it seems "new" to them.

I mix almost exclusively LCR. Why?
- generally speaking, I can get more clarity in the mix because of less phasing and phantom imaging between speakers, particularly when the consumer isn't sitting EXACTLY in the center of the image (they never are in the real world).
- Generally speaking, people can't hear the subtle pan positions between center and left making things like panning 45% LEFT utterly useless. And if they aren't sitting in the aformentioned theoretical center, which they never are, then I promise they can't hear it even if they try.
- you don't waste time trying to figure out useless pan positions. You just pick on of the three spots and move on to the next thing. This keeps your mojo going and prevents you from wasting creative juices on things that really don't matter.

That said, if you are trying to make a documentary style mix, LCR obviously will not work very well. Additionally, even if you mix LCR like I do, if some part doesn't work LCR for whatever reason, just pan it where you want it. It's not like you go straight to hell if you disregard it here and there.

But I've had a lot of success. It works for me. Your mileage may vary. There are a LOT of big name mixers who mix almost entirely LCR. But there are also plenty of big name mixers who pan stuff all over the place. it's just a different approach. You use whatever method you like.
 
Pan law is scoped only to mono tracks, both during panning (automation) and as a result of pan setting on each track that has been set (after the pan law has been set). When changing pan law, the impact of the change kicks in automatically for automated mono tracks and for non-automated mono tracks it kicks in per mono track that you update the pan knob position on. What I need to check is what happens during reloading a session after a pan law setting change and you have not touched the pan knob settings. In that case if loading the session sends a refresh command to the pan knobs with the new pan law settings, it would indirectly have a gain level impact on the mono tracks, which would be seriously bad so I doubt that is the case, but it is definitely worth checking in your particular DAW. Pan law and LCR panning are weakly related in the sense that hard panned mono sound sources are at full gain since they have not been affected by the pan law, while the gain level of the center panned mono sound sources have been attenuated by -3dB on each speaker caused by the -3dB pan law setting. This matters from a gain staging perspective, because in a context of stereo tracks in the mix that have not been impacted by the pan law, those stereo tracks could be negatively adjusted in gain to compensate for the pan law that is active on the mono tracks - the more center panned mono sound sources you have in the mix in combination with the more stereo sound sources you have in the mix in combination with the more attenuation caused by the pan law, the bigger that gain staging issue is. Now, in practice that gain staging issue is to some degree automatically compensated for since the engineer might actually increase the gain on the mono tracks instead of decrease the gain on the stereo tracks (and the engineer might correct this during dedicated gain staging efforts), but it is still of importance relative to gain staging. For this reason, from a gain staging perspective as little gain attenuation as possible caused by pan law, is desired, because it helps to protect the mix from gain staging issues. In practice however, the monitoring configuration will also have an impact on this, so while this is the case in absolute terms, in relative terms it might be different relative to your particular monitoring setup. In practice you might also want a more dramatic impact of the pan automation on mono tracks in the mix or have a monitoring landscape that might benefit from a certain pan law... (that a certain pan law affects gain staging and the stereo balance positively in the particular monitoring environment) So it depends on what you want to achieve.

When LCR panning is used it makes sense to default balance the center panned and mid tracks separately (in a particular order) and default balance the hard panned and side tracks separately (in a particular order), then default balance the two, before then starting the actual balancing process which goes a lot deeper. In many cases in practice, the default balancing process does not exist or is called rough mix and the panning strategy is random. This definitely helps to make the final mix worse sounding.
 
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Why on earth would you change your pan law in the middle of a mix? Most people don't change their pan law EVER, let alone in the middle of making a record. You set your balance by ear, not by numbers, making pan law something you don't even have to think about... unless you automate a pan from say, far left to far right because as it passes through the middle it's going to be perceived as getting too loud or too quiet based on your pan law. But even if you pan law is -3 like mine is, still context will dictate the listener's perception in the middle. Just because my pan law is -3 doesn't mean I can sweep something from left to right and it will sound the same volume to the listener. It depends on what else is going on. So I still might have to ride the fader at the same time.

Pan law is basically something you set once and forget about it.

But like I said, it has no bearing on LCR whatsoever. if your pan law is -0 or -2.5 or -3 or -6 or - 28.37465, you will mix the same way LCR and you will get to the same result, your faders will just be in different positions to get there. With the exception of panning automation which may require more or less fader riding depending on your pan law.
 
Why on earth would you change your pan law in the middle of a mix? Most people don't change their pan law EVER, let alone in the middle of making a record. You set your balance by ear, not by numbers, making pan law something you don't even have to think about... unless you automate a pan from say, far left to far right because as it passes through the middle it's going to be perceived as getting too loud or too quiet based on your pan law. But even if you pan law is -3 like mine is, still context will dictate the listener's perception in the middle. Just because my pan law is -3 doesn't mean I can sweep something from left to right and it will sound the same volume to the listener. It depends on what else is going on. So I still might have to ride the fader at the same time.

Pan law is basically something you set once and forget about it.

But like I said, it has no bearing on LCR whatsoever. if your pan law is -0 or -2.5 or -3 or -6 or - 28.37465, you will mix the same way LCR and you will get to the same result, your faders will just be in different positions to get there. With the exception of panning automation which may require more or less fader riding depending on your pan law.

A pan law change might be required in various situations, for instance if a whole pro tools session is passed from one studio into another and there are different monitoring requirements in that studio, or if for instance there is an engineer change in a project that prefers different pan law settings, or if for instance the engineer fundamentally wants the mix a little wider or more narrow in order to reach the goals and don't like the option of doing that with plugins or monitoring updates. There are cases which is why it has been added on a session basis by design, but I do agree it's quite rare. Pan law you do think of, because it fundamentally impacts on gain structure of your mix. But usually once you find a pan law that gives desired results, you tend to leave that setting unchanged because it works for you in those types of scenarios.

It is not a matter of only the volume faders ending up at different locations due to a full compensation by ear (that's in an ideal theoretical scenario), it is more complex than that because it fundamentally changes the gain structure of your mix, so it is involved in everything from how the plugins react to the summing process, but to your ears those kinds of things are kind of in a dark zone. (which is why it is important to get right)
 
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It's a good way to make everything feel wide, but that's the problem -- everything is wide. Especially when you want your drums to be punchy but not centered at the same time. Hard panning drums loses so much of it's punch but keeping it dead centre will mask the kick/snare a little. Just stereo widen some sounds occasionally that sound nice with a stereo delay, instead of hard panning everything left or right.

I agree that drums tend to lose some punch in certain genres when they are panned, but stereo widening is overused.

A song with only mono tracks is gonna be way wider than any stereo widening effects, and it will sound better when it's all summed to mono. I make stuff exclusively in mono now and pan after the fact. Not because I cut it up a bunch with eq and compression first, but because it allows me to focus on a more important balance and then I worry about how it sounds in stereo (9 times out of 10 it sounds great). A lot of folk recordings have really important elements in mono and panned pretty hard (not all the way though). You can always keep your drums in the middle and pan other things.

To the OP, you can't really overthink it. If it sounds weird to you in LCR it's probably weird, especially if you get that one-sided feeling. Make it feel balanced when you put on headphones. I tend to mix LCR in monitors but check it in headphones after. They have such an exaggerated sound stage that if they sound balanced in good headphones it's hard to imagine they'll sound unbalanced anywhere else (as long as it also sounded good in one mono monitor).

I know I sort of blended LCR and Mono in a way, but I think they are closely related topics, and a lot of newer producers are afraid of a totally mono track. Mono sounds great. A lot of great records have been mono. That's not to say I release mono songs but I do start out in mono. The reason I like working in mono is because I focus completely on arrangement. I use a lot of Native Instruments stuff and use the presets with no plugins on the backend (like Kontakt has a little wrench that shows you exactly what all the glossier knobs on a plugin are doing on the backend). With no plugins, they are really great and natural sounding recordings. So when I start off a track that way, using no eq or compression or panning, it's really just all arrangement and faders from there. But it also depends on your audience. Even though panning is better for separating sounds than eq, some people prefer the latter over the former because they know a majority of their listeners will be listening through mono speakers.

That being said, depending on the phase relationship of a sound, you might actually find it sounds worse in stereo because a certain sound gets significantly louder. Either you can find a balance you like, or you can try to fix the phase relationship. That's why I tend to not have main parts of my song be super wide.
 
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I agree that drums tend to lose some punch in certain genres when they are panned, but stereo widening is overused.

A song with only mono tracks is gonna be way wider than any stereo widening effects, and it will sound better when it's all summed to mono. I make stuff exclusively in mono now and pan after the fact. Not because I cut it up a bunch with eq and compression first, but because it allows me to focus on a more important balance and then I worry about how it sounds in stereo (9 times out of 10 it sounds great). A lot of folk recordings have really important elements in mono and panned pretty hard (not all the way though). You can always keep your drums in the middle and pan other things.

To the OP, you can't really overthink it. If it sounds weird to you in LCR it's probably weird, especially if you get that one-sided feeling. Make it feel balanced when you put on headphones. I tend to mix LCR in monitors but check it in headphones after. They have such an exaggerated sound stage that if they sound balanced in good headphones it's hard to imagine they'll sound unbalanced anywhere else (as long as it also sounded good in one mono monitor).

I know I sort of blended LCR and Mono in a way, but I think they are closely related topics, and a lot of newer producers are afraid of a totally mono track. Mono sounds great. A lot of great records have been mono. That's not to say I release mono songs but I do start out in mono. The reason I like working in mono is because I focus completely on arrangement. I use a lot of Native Instruments stuff and use the presets with no plugins on the backend (like Kontakt has a little wrench that shows you exactly what all the glossier knobs on a plugin are doing on the backend). With no plugins, they are really great and natural sounding recordings. So when I start off a track that way, using no eq or compression or panning, it's really just all arrangement and faders from there. But it also depends on your audience. Even though panning is better for separating sounds than eq, some people prefer the latter over the former because they know a majority of their listeners will be listening through mono speakers.

That being said, depending on the phase relationship of a sound, you might actually find it sounds worse in stereo because a certain sound gets significantly louder. Either you can find a balance you like, or you can try to fix the phase relationship. That's why I tend to not have main parts of my song be super wide.

Understandable relevant points made, I don't think that mixes that sound really great in mono belong to the worst mixes out there in stereo, so yes mono mixing provides a pretty good starting point, maybe especially early on in your mixing career. I am just like you using mono to my advantage, I introduce it even during the tracking process. During mixing, when I start, I mainly work on two sub mixes in the rough mix although it happens I have three sub mixes in the rough mix, it depends. But both of those mixes are separated and they start out in mono or some degree of mono. But from there on I usually leave the mono world and focus on getting good sound in stereo, because who listens in mono these days.
 
Understandable relevant points made, I don't think that mixes that sound really great in mono belong to the worst mixes out there in stereo, so yes mono mixing provides a pretty good starting point, maybe especially early on in your mixing career. I am just like you using mono to my advantage, I introduce it even during the tracking process. During mixing, when I start, I mainly work on two sub mixes in the rough mix although it happens I have three sub mixes in the rough mix, it depends. But both of those mixes are separated and they start out in mono or some degree of mono. But from there on I usually leave the mono world and focus on getting good sound in stereo, because who listens in mono these days.

Ya I never leave it in mono, but I never know if someone wants me to play my song off of a speaker at a party or something, and even if it's atmospheric and gentle, it can still suck summed to one Bose or something like that. So I just make sure both mono and stereo sound great.
 
Pan law you do think of, because it fundamentally impacts on gain structure of your mix.

You've mentioned gain structure a number of times in relation to pan law and stressed the importance of pan law upon it. But I have to disagree. You have to understand that the pan pot is the LAST thing in the signal flow of a channel. ALL processing on a channel, including the actual fader, happens BEFORE the pan pot. This goes for analog consoles and their DAW virtual bretheren. So clearly, pan law will have ZERO effect on gain structure at the channel, or any of the inserts, or any of the sends. It would only affect things after the pan pot which would be any downstream busses. I would consider this an incredibly minor issue for two reasons: first, we aren't talking about a lot of different, a couple dB at best in the center. Nothing that will rock any DAW's world to say the least. Second, because you balance BY EAR you will compensate with the fader anyway. So after the pan pot at whatever downstream buss (either the 2buss or some group buss inbetween if the situation calls for it) the actual levels will be the same REGARDLESS of what pan law you are using. So the ONLY place pan law will affect gain structure is between the fader and the pan pot. And trust me, I have never in my life heard of a pan pot being sensitive to gain levels. Certainly not in any DAW and honestly, not even in any analog consoles.

So just to be clear, a pan law will have ZERO effect on gain structuring of the channel and any processing on the channel because the pan pot (or pan knob, if you will) is AFTER all that stuff including the fader. Pan law will have no effect on anything after the pan knob because anything after the pan knob will be a buss of some sort and you will already have adjusted the (pre-pan) fader to compensate for whatever pan law you use, thus giving you the same output after the pan knob going into the buss. The ONLY way pan law could affect gain staging is post-pan and pre-buss if you balance levels by putting all your faders at pre-determined positions without listening to anything - then you could wind up with different levels on the front side of the buss depending on which pan law you use - but NOBODY mixes that way because it would always sound like ass.

I'm sure if you tried really hard, you could do some crazy signal routing that would cause pan law to affect gain structure inadvertently downstream - but you'd have to really try.

Anyway, I'm really not trying to be a dick (although I think I sound like it). I'm just trying to help you understand these audio concepts and break up some erroneous misconceptions you have.
 
You've mentioned gain structure a number of times in relation to pan law and stressed the importance of pan law upon it. But I have to disagree. You have to understand that the pan pot is the LAST thing in the signal flow of a channel. ALL processing on a channel, including the actual fader, happens BEFORE the pan pot. This goes for analog consoles and their DAW virtual bretheren. So clearly, pan law will have ZERO effect on gain structure at the channel, or any of the inserts, or any of the sends. It would only affect things after the pan pot which would be any downstream busses. I would consider this an incredibly minor issue for two reasons: first, we aren't talking about a lot of different, a couple dB at best in the center. Nothing that will rock any DAW's world to say the least. Second, because you balance BY EAR you will compensate with the fader anyway. So after the pan pot at whatever downstream buss (either the 2buss or some group buss inbetween if the situation calls for it) the actual levels will be the same REGARDLESS of what pan law you are using. So the ONLY place pan law will affect gain structure is between the fader and the pan pot. And trust me, I have never in my life heard of a pan pot being sensitive to gain levels. Certainly not in any DAW and honestly, not even in any analog consoles.

So just to be clear, a pan law will have ZERO effect on gain structuring of the channel and any processing on the channel because the pan pot (or pan knob, if you will) is AFTER all that stuff including the fader. Pan law will have no effect on anything after the pan knob because anything after the pan knob will be a buss of some sort and you will already have adjusted the (pre-pan) fader to compensate for whatever pan law you use, thus giving you the same output after the pan knob going into the buss. The ONLY way pan law could affect gain staging is post-pan and pre-buss if you balance levels by putting all your faders at pre-determined positions without listening to anything - then you could wind up with different levels on the front side of the buss depending on which pan law you use - but NOBODY mixes that way because it would always sound like ass.

I'm sure if you tried really hard, you could do some crazy signal routing that would cause pan law to affect gain structure inadvertently downstream - but you'd have to really try.

Anyway, I'm really not trying to be a dick (although I think I sound like it). I'm just trying to help you understand these audio concepts and break up some erroneous misconceptions you have.

I do understand your points, the inserts in Pro Tools are post fader, just wanted to remind you about that, since it is important to be aware of that (which you maybe are). This means that if you have a compressor on an insert, the amount of signal pushed into it is determined by the volume fader. But maybe you are using a different DAW.

When it comes to gain staging, small differences can have a big impact, simply because the underlying voltages are increasing cumulatively by each "step" increased at each gain stage. Therefore, in order to understand the quality of your gain structure, it's not enough to just use your ears, in case you want really good sound you need to measure the input and output voltages, those could be totally off eventhough the sound "appears" to sound good in your studio environment. These things are perspective driven, meaning that the gain structure you find to be great someone else might find to be poor. This is because we need to make it sound good both in our studio and in all the playback systems out there and for that you have to have the gain structure very well optimized in absolute terms (not in relative terms). So this means that even small level impacts/changes are important to be aware of, because if those happen at high gain levels they have huge voltage impacts, so it's not only the small attenuation caused by the pan law that counts, but at what gain level that takes place. Just wanted to highlight that very important fact without sounding rude.
 
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Okay, I’m not even going to argue this anymore. You just keep working the way you are working. I just wanted to avoid some people getting some misinformation and having that affect what they are trying to do. Inserts can be post fader or pre fader. But that is not going to affect the way the pan pot (a linear process) will respond, nor will it affect a downstream buss because you’ve already compensated. If you have a post fader insert (not very common, I might add), and it’s a linear process, then it’s not going to care where your fader is provided you are not slamming ridiculous levels nobody should be approaching – if you are approaching those levels, then you have much more serious freakin’ problems than pan laws. If it’s nonlinear, then you will already have compensated with it’s input/output knobs or with the fader itself. So again, it doesn’t matter.

So, to DarkRed, keep doing what you do. For everyone else, pan law is not going to impact your gain structuring – your faders will just be in slightly different places by up to a few dB in comparison to a mix that sounds exactly the same but has a different pan law. Basically the only way you can screw up is to change your pan law halfway through a mix – in which case you will discover that things sound different and you’ll have to run around tweaking to get back to the sound you had. You’ll be able to get back to the same exact sound, but you’ll drive yourself crazy. For any static channels, provided that you don’t monkey around with your pan law in the middle of a mix, pan law will affect nothing except where you stick your fader by a few dB – it will not affect the sound. Pan law will only come into play when you dynamically pan a track (ie automate a pan that sweeps from left to right). Lower pan laws (like -6) will cause that sound to get quiet as it gets to the center and higher pan laws (like -0) will cause the sound to appear louder in the center while medium pan laws (like -3) will cause the sound to appear generally the same volume as it sweeps across the field. Most older Neve consoles were -3 I think. I think most of the older SSLs were -4.5. Other consoles have had all kinds of different pan laws. Some of them had pan laws that were not nice even numbers. Almost none of the engineers who used them or still use them know what the f*ck the pan laws of their consoles are. Because, like I said, unless you have something sweep across the stere field during a mix, it is MEANINGLESS. And you often adjust faders for these sweeps ANYWAY. So nobody cares. That said, a -3 pan law will generally require less adjustment during those big panning sweeps than other pan laws. But it sure as heck isn’t going to mess with your gain staging and it sure as heck will not affect the audio quality of your mix. And it SURE AS HECK has zero bearing on mixing LCR for pete’s sake.

I’m done. Anybody that disagrees with me, I humbly refer them to all my previous posts on this subject.
 
chris, let's leave it at this, I think both of us are sharing our authentic perspectives on this, so then the ones reading this thread can focus on whatever makes sense to them.
 
pan law is immaterial to this discussion period - most don't know how to set it in a daw and in hardware it is fixed

I would also point out this not the first time this has been discussed this year or any other year for that matter
 
pan law is immaterial to this discussion period - most don't know how to set it in a daw and in hardware it is fixed

I would also point out this not the first time this has been discussed this year or any other year for that matter

I do think this belongs to the basics though and I find many just skip this step thinking this is stuff you don't need to understand, but I find you do - and well - simply because it is the basics. As a mastering engineer I see this all the time and every time I make the conclusion this is simply what it is like when engineers don't take the time and learn the basics. Yes it is true that once you find a pan law that yields good gain structure for you, then it can be forgotten, it's there, it's optimal, it works. But when thinking of how to pan well, you have to consider all parts of it and its relationship to gain staging and monitoring. There are many projects out there that have a bad absolute gain structure, these mixes are to some degree "rescued" at mastering, but 99% of these mixes would be better sounding in the final master if these gain structure issues would not occur in mixing. And they are easily fixed, when you pay enough attention to the basics.
 
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It's not a gimmick or a fad.

LCR mixing isn't the gimmick. The idea that it's a magic bullet is a gimmick.

It's no different to people thinking compressors are a magic bullet. Compression isn't a fad; the way it's used has been. Then not using compressors was the next fad.

It's not like mix engineers arrived at LCR mixing and thought "That's it lads... we've solved mixing! Tell the forums!" They just made things work.
 
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