panning guitars

[six]

I recently found out that for things like 70's rock or not-so-hard-rock in general 1 single guitar panned a bit (not to make it sound "off-sides") to one side sounds quite ok unless you want a wall of sound hitting your face.

and then there's hard-rock... which I mainly do (or at least harder 80's style glam-rock ).
now to get that biiiig guitar sound - since guitars are all you have - I double the rhythm-guitar an pan one hard left and the other one hard right, very ordinary, right?
and there's my problem: panning the guitars almost fully left/right leaves a big hole in the middle. sure there's still the bass - but the vocals usally are quite a bit higher than the bass and so they sound lost and lonely. lately I've fixed it by just adding a third guitar dead center at a lower volume... but that's almost a bit too much guitar.

should I just pan the two guitars a bit closer? I mean listening to rock-records I can say there's two guitars panned to left and right but not how much they're panned. would you agree that panning too hard tears things apart? what's normal for hard-rock (something like motley crue, maybe whitesnake, poison sometimes...)?

[Chibi Nappa]

Personally, I like to pan hard left/right and get those guitars WAY out there. If your drum mix is in sterio, but not too wide, it might fill up a lot of that middle. Another thing I like to do is have the dry guitars hard left/right and then pan their reverb and delay somewhere closer to the middle. I don't think a 3rd guitar is needed if it doesn't add something different musically. I don't like adding something just to take up space. Try making a mix with just your bass, drums, and vocals. Play with that until everything sounds as full as you need it to be, then add guitars on the sides.

Also, don't mix with headphones. Something can sound too far to the side in phones when the reality is they sound fine on speakers. Remember, if something is only in the left channel on a pair of phones, your right ear can't hear it at all. If it is all the way left on a set of speakers, your right ear can still hear it.