Panning in the past

dainbramage

dainbramage

New member
Probably a stupid question, but... I've heard mixers in the past only had a choice between hard right, center and hard left. Why didn't they just duplicate a track, have one panned right and one panned left, then adjust the faders to where they wanted the track panned? I'm sure copying a tape and having it on its own track would be easy peasy for an engineer? What am I missing here?
 
Well, I've been playing with mixers since the early 1970s and have never encountered a stereo mixer that didn't allow panning in the same way we do today.

What I do remember is some mono mixers used in broadcasting that had an A/B switch on each channel that changed the signal routing. We used this sort of like a PFL to let us preview stuff on channel B when cueing up a tape machine or something, then switch to channel A for the actual playback.

I wonder if, in the early days of stereo, somebody came up with the idea of using a mono mixer built this way as a kludged way of doing two channels even if not true stereo? That's all I can think of.
 
dainbramage said:
Probably a stupid question, but... I've heard mixers in the past only had a choice between hard right, center and hard left. Why didn't they just duplicate a track, have one panned right and one panned left, then adjust the faders to where they wanted the track panned? I'm sure copying a tape and having it on its own track would be easy peasy for an engineer? What am I missing here?
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As in use up one of the three or four they might have had at the time..? ( No I don't know the time line between LCR boards and tape tracks of the times, but just sort of guessing..
 
Tons of modern day mix engineers still go by the LCR route. It makes things simpler/faster as opposed to making minute decisions on very fine panning parameters that most listeners won't even notice especially in the majority of listening environments. They either hear a sound from left, phantom center or right. Except maybe a tambourine or shaker track that would stick out like a sore thumb when far L or R and also get lost if in center.

For example, CLA is an LCR guy (and has mentioned I think in a Pensado's Place interview about how he is LCR for everything except some percussion like I just mentioned). I tend to adopt that same strategy. When i first started mixing I'd pan the rhythm guitars say 50% L and 50% right, but I realized it was just more open and wide to go everything full throttle either L, C or R for most part. Like BG vox or gang vox - if I had 4 tracks I'd pan two of em hard L and R and then the other 2 like 50% or so, but then I realized it made little difference and had the same impact with less clutter if I just shoved 2 hard R and 2 hard L.

Edit: I'm firsly certain I missed the point of your post though, so please disregard. haha :facepalm:
 
I heard that the console that Abbey Road had when the Beatles first started recording (we're talking 1963 here) only had LCR limitations, but that was changed to what we know today in a couple of years...and this is a studio known for being technologically behind the times by quite a bit. In the history of stereo recordings, it was a very minor, brief period before most people even had stereo playback systems, so in effect it wasn't even that relavant in the history of the medium.
 
ido1957 said:
If you duplicate a track and pan both L/R won't you just get it all center?
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No, it's rather the equivalent to starting with a single track and varying the L/R volumes- 'panning'. In this case (no ganged/opposite gain pots) but doing the balancing with the two faders.
Well, yes you'd get image centered when they're both the same level of course.
I guess the up shot here is it would've likely been a whole lot easier for an engineer to make a pan circuit than come up with 'unlimited tracks :)
 
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We actually learned about this in my college courses. In Fantasia, Disney basically invented panning as we know it today by doing just that. They wanted it to sound like the music was following the characters, so they took two mono channels that were fed the same input, panned one hard left and one hard right (back then they only had a little switch that went left, right, or center), and then adjusted the volume to simulate panning like we have now with a pan pot. In other words, bring down the left all the way and it's all right, bring the right down all the way it's all left, and anywhere in between.

EDIT: not as relevant to the thread, but they also invented overdubbing back then.
 
I firmly believe many video people can spot a soft shot or misframed composition or even subtle colour shifts without even thinking, but they can totally miss an entire audio track being missing, or have monitor systems so awful they cannot hear the 50HZ hum or that awful high pitched whistle the viewers certainly will. They shoot twin channel on location and have perhaps a lav on ch1 and the camera mic on 2 and their finished product has these firmly left and right. Sound is not a five minute bolt on to a 55 minute edit session. You even see the reverse with famous big name audio producers knocking out video 'how to' material with superb audio and dreadful visuals! You must have a proper balance between the two - no pun intended
 
rob aylestone said:
I firmly believe many video people can spot a soft shot or misframed composition or even subtle colour shifts without even thinking, but they can totally miss an entire audio track being missing, or have monitor systems so awful they cannot hear the 50HZ hum or that awful high pitched whistle the viewers certainly will. They shoot twin channel on location and have perhaps a lav on ch1 and the camera mic on 2 and their finished product has these firmly left and right. Sound is not a five minute bolt on to a 55 minute edit session. You even see the reverse with famous big name audio producers knocking out video 'how to' material with superb audio and dreadful visuals! You must have a proper balance between the two - no pun intended
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Stand by for an "In my day we used to walk 20 miles barefoot through the snow" post.

The modern industry is largely responsible for how rubbish TV sound (and pictures) are today.

When I first started, the minimum crew for even the simplest shoot was a cameraman plus a specialist sound man. If the shoot was more than a basic news job then camera assistants and boom operators were quickly added--and everyone was specifically trained in their jobs.

Back at base, one person did the editing of pictures and basic sound but the edit was then sent to a specialist audio post suite that smoothed of problems, added atmos to cover transitions etc. etc. To show my age, this was originally all film (16mm and 35mm) with the transition to video happening in the late 1970s/early 1980s. (Obviously there were also multicamera studio and OB productions...the same principle applies--larger and more skilled crews).

Nowadays a sound operator on a single camera location shoot is considered an expensive, unnecessary luxury. The camera op is probably a kid straight out of school and he/she is expected to do sound as well and "what do you mean you need an extra mic...isn't there one on the camera?". I've even seen shoots where a reporter carries the camera, plonks it on a tripod then goes and stands in front.

Back at base it's the same. Specialist editors and audio post people are gone and on many shoots the producer/director/reporter is expected to do their own edit. Hear 50Hz hum? Unlikely on cheap computer speakers that roll off below 150Hz.

Rant over...but it was changes in this direction that prompted me to take early retirement.
 
The simple answer to the question of why they didnt just copy the track is because the machines only had 4 tracks to begin with. even if you added another machine, you would lose one of the four tracks to sync them up. (assuming they had sync at the time). So you would end up with two machines running for 6 tracks total...and the copies would all be second generation, so they will sound a little different.

In the analog world, when 8 tracks was a lot, you couldn't just fly stuff around freely without consequences.
 
In my first studio I deliberately built it so even-number channel panning controls where in one building and odd-number channel panning controls where in another building located on the other side of a snow covered field the size of a football field. This helped in two ways: 1) Made things difficult to force me to think creatively and I had plenty of time to do that walking back and forth across the field several hundred times a day. 2) The final stereo mix sounded much wider than anything you'll achieve today with digital because right channels were on one side of the field and left channels were on the other.

This is when we first started using the term, "Stereo field."
 
Why does this require more tracks? By the time you're mixing the thing, you can mult that one track out to as many faders as you want.

Except that the mix desks themselves only had so many channels, and you couldn't just hop on amazon and have them deliver you a bigger mixer tomorrow. If you wanted more channels you had to rebuild your board.

And nobody was completely sure what stereo meant at that point. They were literally inventing this medium at the time, experimenting to see how it would and could work. Nobody had ever heard the "standard" that we expect today
 
MrWrenchey said:
We actually learned about this in my college courses. In Fantasia, Disney basically invented panning as we know it today by doing just that. They wanted it to sound like the music was following the characters, so they took two mono channels that were fed the same input, panned one hard left and one hard right (back then they only had a little switch that went left, right, or center), and then adjusted the volume to simulate panning like we have now with a pan pot. In other words, bring down the left all the way and it's all right, bring the right down all the way it's all left, and anywhere in between.

EDIT: not as relevant to the thread, but they also invented overdubbing back then.
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and actually the very first concept for Fantasia was to have some ridiculous number of tracks ..... seems like it was 18 or something like that so individual instruments would come form different spots on the stage. Ultimately that was too complicated to get set up in theaters so they settled on 3 channels back when it first released.
 
Beck said:
In my first studio I deliberately built it so even-number channel panning controls where in one building and odd-number channel panning controls where in another building located on the other side of a snow covered field the size of a football field. This helped in two ways: 1) Made things difficult to force me to think creatively and I had plenty of time to do that walking back and forth across the field several hundred times a day. 2) The final stereo mix sounded much wider than anything you'll achieve today with digital because right channels were on one side of the field and left channels were on the other.

This is when we first started using the term, "Stereo field."
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I really feel I am out in left field reading that.
That's to say, well 'nice, and.. thank you :D
 
Farview said:
The simple answer to the question of why they didnt just copy the track is because the machines only had 4 tracks to begin with. even if you added another machine, you would lose one of the four tracks to sync them up. (assuming they had sync at the time). So you would end up with two machines running for 6 tracks total...and the copies would all be second generation, so they will sound a little different.

In the analog world, when 8 tracks was a lot, you couldn't just fly stuff around freely without consequences.
Click to expand...

Got it. I didn't realize tracks were that exclusive back then.
 
dainbramage said:
Got it. I didn't realize tracks were that exclusive back then.
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24 track tape decks weren't common until the early-mid 70s. In the mid 60's, 4 tracks was common. I believe Deep Purple's Machine Head album was done on 8 tracks. (I could be thinking of Made in Japan, or I could be wrong)
 
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