Panning, what's the best way to start ?

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DYEONE

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Stereo image;

How much panning on average do you apply to sounds, to create strereo space in your tracks.
I always fear putting something too much on 1 side, do you alternate panning with some sounds during your sequence also.

I find i'm ok with panning percussion as part of drum loops, crazy scattering not too far from the centre works really well on hats and odd bits, therefore not much thought needs to go into it to give a break some stereo rattle.

I've heard always keep bass, and main drum hits dead centre as otherwise you'll have problems if pressed to vinyl (something about making the needle jump if low Hz aren't centered.....)

What about stuff like strings, stabs, leads and vocals, i always think these should be dead centre also to catch the attention, but surely not everything goes dead centre.
Confusing myself here.

Anybody know any set fast rules on the best place to start?
 
I was listening to underworld the other day and noticed that they use extreme panning on some of the tracks from there last album.

I find that main elements in my songs will always take the central area but be fanned out a bit, ie a drum kit I will use minimal panning positions to get a bit of space between the drums.

Instrumental parts could occupy any area and sometimes auto-pan in more expressive parts during lead solo synth parts.

Random panning can be interesting with bass and also just background elements.

swirling pads can give a lot of space by moving from left to right in some expressive order.

I think minimal panning can be used through-out on all sounds/instruments/etc used in a song, panning can be very important in busyier moments of a song where space is essential.

thats my 2 p's worth :)

fluxtah
 
I often use hard panning and even spatializers to spread things out beyond the stereo field. A general rule is to keep bass fequencies in the center and higher frequencies to the outside. The brain can place the direction of these more easily than bass. Often I use spacial plugins on reverb to move this outside the direct signal. Wide stereo feild is a characteristic of much of todays music and normal stereo can sound quite tame in comparison.

More important is to keep a balance in the perceived weight of the Left and Right mix busses.
 
Thanx, just to elaborate on what you've said.
Quote:- Higher frequenceies to the outside;

Does this mean a fixed pan position, or alternating from L-R over a period of time (eg orchestral style strings)?

,and how wide would you go, so that it's obviously noticeable that a sound is on one side, or so you know it's creating space but you can't really hear the audible offset ?

You've mentioned panning reverb, do you mean on this that you keep the dry sound panned centre and have the wet signal in some sort of panning effect, or the whole thing ?

Soz for the specific Q's.... (hope other people get mileage out of this)

Cheers
 
Umm , well high frequencies are used by the ear to locate direction. So panning these more than bass freq makes more sense.

I didn't know that orchestral string players alternated from right to left , but I suppose a call and answer accross the stereo feild could be nice.

I hard pan things like guitars alot. So its real noticeble , then ballance up their levels. I sometimes like backing vocals or reverbs to seem to wrap around the head , out of the normal stereo feild.

If wanting to retain pan postitioning of a dry signal it is quite important to send it to a stereo reverb , as a mono send will place the instrument in the center of the reverb feild and smear the dry signals pan position.

Another trick is to send a signal to a mono reverb and pan the dry hard right and the wet hard left ( or visa versa ).

Hope this answers your questions
 
Thanks Robin, very useful.

I think the bit about orchestral players moving is probably more to do with the way an orchestra is seated in an oval shape, with each side consisting of string players playing contrasting pieces. No expert on this but something i can vividly remember from being a child was being dragged to see some classical show and watching the string players almost like tennis, competing on each side, getting more dramtic as they switched.

One thing you said which sounds contradicting (probably my reading);Quote:- 'I hard pan things like guitars alot. So its real noticeble , then ballance up their levels'
What's the point in panning if you're going to re-balance the levels ? (I think i misunderstand what you wrote).

Like the tip on using a mono sound with a stereo reverb, nice one.
 
One thing you said which sounds contradicting (probably my reading);Quote:- 'I hard pan things like guitars alot. So its real noticeble , then ballance up their levels'
Click to expand...

Well strictly speaking panning is actually a simultaneous gain change on the two linked master channels ( stereo being two mono channels ) ,however this occurs after the gain change of the sounds individual channel , directly before it is fed to the master stereo bus.

What I mean is I pan them right out so one comes out L speaker and the other out the R. Then I ballance the individual channel levels so the "weight" of them seems even. There is no sense of lopsidedness in the mix.
 
Hmmm...I'm just talkin' from what I usually do...which isn't always this way...but usually what I notice myself doing half the time:

Bass - I place it dead center and use a sort of Chorus on it to make the left and right sides slightly different from eachother...makes it sound phatter too.

"Real" Drums - I usually enjoy panning "real" drums to where they would realistically be if you were sitting at the drumkit and then randomly changing them around durring variations/breaks/fills/etc.

Electronica Drums - I always have the deep end of the kick directly in the center and then do whatever else I want to the high end. I like to place a sort of panned delay onto my hihats where they hit in the center and then echo once to either the left or right side to kinda give a shifting sound. The snare I usually widen the stereo image and then on the percussion I widen it more. Certain noises, like frequency sweeps/blips, I'll pan completely to the left or right side and possibly widen them in the stereo image aswell.

Orchestral - I usually pan them how they would be in an orchestra...sometimes I forget though =P. On strings I sometimes Have fun with them where the lower notes are centered and as the notes get into higher octaves they pan out more.

Guitar - Record the same run twice and pan one left and one right. Play with the stereo image if you must.

Lead synths - they go Anywhere. Sometimes I'll plug them into the master(output) once in the center and then again through a random panner turned down so the panning jumps about but not too much.

Background synths - Lotsa stereo widening. Sometimes I'll put on a rotational effect on them so they seem to spin spin spin. Chorus.

General stuff:
1. Auto-pan is your friend.
2. If I put anything on the left side I'll usually put in another sound to fill in the right...so if there are 5 sounds on the left there are usually 5 other sounds on the right aswell.
3. I like Ping-Pong delays.
4.I also like delays that have seperate feedback levels for left and right. that way you can make the right one lower so it will fade out sooner than the left and the sound will seem to drift from the center out.
5. Random panning is fun.

=)
 
...is it ok to have 2 copies of a snare drum on separate tracks, and pan one a bit to the left and the other a bit to the right...???...just to make it sound bigger i guess....

...would there be any problems with vinyl pressing if u did this..?
 
DJ Ransom: It's called "Doubling" and no, there's no real problem with it other than it can put in unwanted distortion/clipping if you don't level them correctly.
 
DJ Ransom said:
...is it ok to have 2 copies of a snare drum on separate tracks, and pan one a bit to the left and the other a bit to the right...???...just to make it sound bigger i guess....
Click to expand...

Don't do this. The more to the centre you have something, the more upfront it sounds, and the snare definitely deserves to be right in the middle.

I know youre not supposed to mix on headphones, especially when doing stereo stuff, but its an easy way to guage how the left compares with the right - dynamically and spectrally.

Panning is more of an afterthought. It's nice to have call and response on either side, but not too stiffly panned.

A main instrument shouldn't be too far out to the side.

If youre recording a band, then pan the instruments, to where their sounds would come from if you were standing in front of them. The singer is almost always standing at the front. The other singers might be either side. The drums are in the middle too.
 
...well, the stuff i'm making is all electronic, no "real" sounds hear i guess...anyway, now i've got two different opinions....

...hmmm, i did like the sound i got from "doubling", does anyone else do this with snare drums...i'm not doing this with the kick, that'll be dead centre, i'm only talking about the snare drum here...

...thanx.
 
I suppose if they're both the same sound with the same effects, and they sound even then it should be alright. The only thing this would do is just make it appear louder, so you might as well free a track by just turning up one snare and centering it. Just try not to make it sound as if the snare is heavier on one side than the other.
 
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Panning two seperate sounds slightly out from center , can help seperate their focus and make them individually clear. Same panning will help the sounds blend and sit together , depends on your preference.
 
but if the two sounds are identical, as is said above, then the overall effect is going to be that the sound will come out louder, and possibly off-centre
 
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