panning

fingmung

New member
ok im learning how to rerd properly and want to know more about panning. im recording basic rock, punk, rockabilly kind of music and wanted to know what i should pan, and which way.

By the way i use cool edit pro, if that helps at all???
 
fingmung said:
ok im learning how to rerd properly and want to know more about panning. im recording basic rock, punk, rockabilly kind of music and wanted to know what i should pan, and which way.

By the way i use cool edit pro, if that helps at all???
There are no "specific" panning rules - it's a matter of taste and context. This article may help give you some tips: Mixing 101
 
Drums, bass, and vocals are "usually" left in the center.

Anything else is fair game. Go with what sounds good, but try to keep Left and Right BALANCED in percieved loudness.

Just use your common sense, i.e. don't pan two instruments in the same frequency hard right if you want to hear them each independently (hi-hat/tambourine). When you stumble on something cool, you'll know it right away.
 
for me, it's usually kick, snare, bass, vocals and leads (guitar, etc) go in the center. everything else gets panned. i don't believe in panning things partially--so it's either hard left or right for me.

my rationale is that that's they way they did it in the 60s (b/c that's all they had) and plenty of great sounding tracks came out of that :D......plus, i've found that putting things only part way out to a side tends to muddy things up more than make them shine. and i'm panning them b/c i want them out of the middle, so......

i guess i'm just a fan of if you're gonna bother panning something, you might as well *pan* it. :D


YMMV,
wade
 
mrface2112 said:
for me, it's usually kick, snare, bass, vocals and leads (guitar, etc) go in the center. everything else gets panned. i don't believe in panning things partially--so it's either hard left or right for me.

my rationale is that that's they way they did it in the 60s (b/c that's all they had) and plenty of great sounding tracks came out of that :D......plus, i've found that putting things only part way out to a side tends to muddy things up more than make them shine. and i'm panning them b/c i want them out of the middle, so......

i guess i'm just a fan of if you're gonna bother panning something, you might as well *pan* it. :D


YMMV,
wade

There is a down side to that approach of course.
If for example you're listening whilst driving in the car, where your head is closer to one speaker (the right here in England, the left in the US!) then you'll mostly hear only the instruments on your side and the instruments on the 'far' side may get drowned out/lost.

By only partialy panning, at least some of each instrument is heard on both channels.

Having said that I usualy hard-pan wherever i have doubled up on an instrument, typicaly double-tracked guitars.
 
First do what Manning1 said. Then go nuts with it. The most important thing is balance, so if you pan something really hard to one side, you'll pretty much need to pan something hard the other side so it doesn't sound like you've got a blown speaker. Some of my favorite artists are pretty wildly panned, but unless you're really paying attention or listening for it, it just helps the song. Wide panning is also a good way to help keep instruments fighting with each other...anyhoo, have fun. :p
 
what a lot of people don't realise is that panning with amplitude panning (i.e. the pan pot on your mixer) isn't the only way you can pan things.

You can also pan stuff by using very small delays. That way the sound from one speaker will arrive a little bit later than the other thus creating a sense direction.

The upside of using this is that you don't have to be in the sweet spot to hear some sort of stereo. the downside is that you can get comb-filter effects when playing back your mix in mono. This is of course not a problem if your music will only be played back in stereo.

i usually use a combination of amplitude and runtime(delay) panning to get what i want.
 
I do a lot of country music mixing, and I typically pan based on instrument. Here's the basic setup I use...

Drums - snare and kick in the center, hi-hat mid-left, ride mid-right, toms left to right in order of highest to lowest, and spread out the crashes as desired

Bass - center

Acoustic Rhythm Guitar (where applicable) - two ways, either record two rhythm parts and put one to the far left, the other to the far right, or just copy one track and spread those out, which ever you prefer

Electric Rhythm Guitar - same philosophy as above if no acoustic guitar is used

Piano - if it is not essential to the overall sound of the song (i.e., it is not a piano-driven tune, like, for example, "Desperado,"), then I'd mix it to the right, not completely, but almost

Electric "riff" Guitar - If this is for additional licks, but no melody, I'd go to the left, same idea as piano, not all the way, but close

There is your rhythm track. Any lead vocals and solo parts (voice or instrumental) should be in the middle. If there are background vocals, I usually put the higher one to the left and the lower one to the right.

Like everyone else says, these are just based on preference, so you are open to experiment. I just hope this can be a help!!
 
Hi

First, I try to place the instruments like I would hear them if the music was played live. My keyboard has 4 voices per instrument and I do the panning on the voices to keep some stereo immage on the instruments. For example, the pan setting from left to right goes like this -3,-2,-1,0,+1,+2 and +3; -3 being hard left pan and +3 being hard right pan. So when I want to place a pianno on position +1 and the pan for the 4 voices are -3, 0, 0, +3, it will end up -1, +1, +1, +3. If I want to put it in position +2, it will be +1, +2,+2,+3. That way, my pianno is on the right with some space.

For the pianno, you can have it right or left, with the original pan (low notes on the left and high notes on the right) or reverse pan to emulate the player facing you. In that case, you can place the pianno on the right if you don't want the low notes of the pianno to compete with your bass or on the left to better hear the high notes. In the song that I'm doing right now, the pianno is on the left because I don't want the high notes to compete with the electric guitar that is on the right.

/Jack Real.
 
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