How do you pan your tracks?

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BluesPower

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Is there a tried and tested pan position you stick to for bass/drums/guitar/vocals, or do you change it depending on the song?

I usually put Vocals and drums at 12 o'clock, Bass 9 o'clock, and guitar at 3 o'clock. Seem like these are the best positions I can come up with.

I haven't experimented with more than 4 tracks or overdubbed instruments.
Do you pan your overdubbed guitar parts and bass parts together in the same position, or change them around?
 
I pretty much pan everything the same with every mix:

1. Hi-hat to about 8:00
2. Rides and other aux cymbals between 8 and 10
3. Crash cymbals around 10 and 2
4. Snare slightly off center
5. Toms at 8 and 4

Lunch at noon

6. Kick and bass straight up the center
7. Guitars at 9 and 3
8. Vocals slightly off center
9. Back vocals and lead guitars a little more off center
 
Bass/kick/vocals are typically placed in the center of the soundstage... the placement of the other tracks can and do vary!!!
 
90% of the elements in my mixes are hard left, hard right or right up the center. If the drums are stereo I will pan out the overheads and pan the toms and hi hat to fit that image. Listen to almost any big hit record in rock or pop from the last 40 years and you will see that they pan pretty extreme as well.

The most important thing to keep dead center is kick and bass.
 
the band i record the most has 2 guitarists and a harp player along with bass and drums. it took me a while to find a mixing solution that made sense and didn't turn everything into mush.

bass, kick, snare, lead vocals and lead guitar all go in the middle. drums are pretty widely panned (i've got a big kit :D). rhythm guitar goes on the right and harp goes on the left.

why lead guitar in the middle and not harp instead? b/c harp and the rhythm guitar both play more or less supporting roles rather than lead ones. putting the lead guitar to one side really made the mixes sound unbalanced. when there's a harp solo, it comes through plenty clear on the left, and with judicious compression on the rhythm guitar on the right, everything's got its own nicely carved out space.


with other bands, obviously, it'll differ. generally, though, kick, snare, lead vocals and bass all go in the middle.......everything else will and can be up for grabs. sometimes, though, it's fun to pan things "weirdly"--listen to Abbey Road......on some tunes the bass is on the left and the drums are on the right.


cheers,
wade
 
<< Listen to almost any big hit record in rock or pop from the last 40 years and you will see that they pan pretty extreme as well. >>

there's definitely truth in this, and IMO, it's due to two things. first, and it's not the case as much these days, but a lot of the early mixing boards (as we know them) were mono, and on those that weren't mono you didn't necessarily have pan *knobs*, but rather buttons for left, right and center. so you either panned hard, or you didn't pan at all. there was none of this "10 and 2" stuff that we talk about these days.

secondly, hard panning can sometimes help you maintain mono compatibility--that's something that's lost on a lot of home recorders. a lot of times what seems to be a beautifully lush stereo mix can easily be reduced to absolute crap when thrown into mono. hard panning won't solve this problem for you or make everything instantly mono-compatible, but it can sure help. at least, it can in my experience. ;)


wade
 
I put anything that is to hold the low end in the center always. Anything that is the foundation of the song I will have centered--even if that involves "balancing" multi-tracked guitars at 3:00, 9:00, 10:00 and 2:00 respectively.

I try to avoid getting too wide of a stereo image on drums unless I'm working with electronic drums/drum machines/samples in an industrial format (stereo tricks are the norm for that genre).

I tend to place drums the "British" way--which is how the drummer would hear them: high hat left, high tom to low tom going left to right, etc.... I grew up on a lot of British Invasion bands as a little kid so that's the only way drums sound right to me... plus I play drums myself. It just seems more natural to me.

So for me:

Kick - center

Snare - center

Toms - typically set from high to low tom (assuming 3 tom set) 10:00, 1:00, 2:00

Overheads - generally L side at 9:00 and R side at 3:00 (but reversed the Brit way)

High Hat - typically about 9:00 to combat some bleed into the overheads to give it stereo placement

Bass (guitar or synth) - center

Guitars - balanced out with either multiple tracks or possibly synths--I don't like to favor a stereo side for melodic instruments

Synth - depends what it is doing... the more fundemental to the song the closer to center I place things, or balance them out with a double

Vocals - center

Backing vocals - usually around 10:00 or 2:00
 
Interesting. Seems like I should be putting the bass in the center, since most of you recommend it. I will try this when I start working with more than 4 tracks.
Right now, i got drums/vocals in the center, so something has to be left and right too, this being the guitar and bass.

As far as panning each drum piece in a different place, sounds like there are many cool possibilities. Does anyone ever pan all the drum pieces in the same place to have it sound like a complete drum kit in one place, maybe heard as if you were listening from a distance, as opposed to the the stereo sound of being right in the middle of it?
 
I noticed a lot of you pan your drums from drummers perspective...reasons why? I like audience perspective since that's how the listener usually listens to a live group, and that's what I like to try and recreate. Comments?
 
bennychico11 said:
I noticed a lot of you pan your drums from drummers perspective...reasons why? I like audience perspective since that's how the listener usually listens to a live group, and that's what I like to try and recreate. Comments?
Click to expand...
Unless the producer or a band leader has a specific preference, I tend towards audience perspective as well... often-times, the band doesn't hear the difference until you point it out anyways.....
 
bennychico11 said:
I noticed a lot of you pan your drums from drummers perspective...reasons why? I like audience perspective since that's how the listener usually listens to a live group, and that's what I like to try and recreate. Comments?
Click to expand...

I pan audience perspective when trying to create a very natural sounds stage for something like a folk or acoustic jazz record, which really means the drums are almost mono. Other wise I always pan right handed drummer perspective for one simple reason. I LOVE TO PLAY AIR DRUMS!!!!!!! I am right handed. I can always tell when I start playing air drums along with the track then I am almost done with the mix.
 
I usually pan for audience perspective too. Other than that I don't really have any set standards that I go to. Obviously as Blue Bear stated, kick, bass, and vocals are usually center. One interesting thing that I've found is that when I have two or more guitar parts in a song, and I have them panned left and right, for some reason each guitar part sounds significantly better on a specific side. If that makes any sense. I always check to see whether each part sounds better on the left or the right. Almost every single time one combination of left and right sounds a lot better than they other combination.
 
I much prefer to think of panning as a creative endeavor, and don't have any set rules for how to do it. I like to have the song dictate the panning.

If you want to hear artistic panning as it can be done, listen to anything Tchad Blake has mixed. Amazing, beautiful, and unusual panning. The other guy who some times does more interesting panning is Bob Clearmountain. I was listening to Del Amitri's song "Roll to Me", which was mixed by Bob Clearmountain, and I noticed that the lead vocals are all on one side. In fact, aside from the reverb, the only thing on the left is vocals (lead and background) and the single line acoustic guitar hook. Everything else is on the right, and none of the stuff on the left is on the right. No drums, no bass, no rhythm guitar – nothing. It knocked me off my socks, I was so surprised. Very cool stuff.

Try everything, and figure out what sounds good to you.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
I generally aim for a fairly balanced stereo field and rarely put anything hard left or right because it sounds vaguely unnatural to me. However, sometimes I will add subtle motion to parts by having them move around in the stereo field subtly--almost undetectibly to the untrained ear.
 
There's some good advice here but you have to be flexible.

The bass, kick-drum and lead vocal usually go in the centre for punch and projection, with the lead vocal sometimes panned a little off-centre if another lead instrument is playing around it.

The guitars are often the problem. The smaller the band, the more difficult the mix is to balance, especially if there is just bass, drums, vocals and one rhythm guitar playing crunchy chords. I've found in the past that in that situation it's sometimes a good idea to put down the rhythm guitar in stereo (or just copy it to another track or even another 3 tracks - Keith Richard used to use 10 tracks to thicken up the sound) and pan the two tracks about 8 o'clock and 4 o'clock (others slightly inside if you use more). Spread the drums from 9 o'clock to 3 o'clock with the bass drum in the centre, the hi-hats at 1 o'clock and the snare-drum at 11 o'clock (or 2 and 10 if you feel that they're getting in the way of the vocal). Bring in the lead guitar panned slightly to one side and leave the vocals panned slightly to the other. Some people like to have backing vocals to one side like a section, but I like to pan them across the spectrum from 9 o'clock to 3 o'clock with the opposite register near the lead vocal (i.e. if the lead vocal is in a high register put the low b.vox next to it or vice-versa).

But also experiment and don't forget that panning is only one part of a 4-dimensional separation process along with register which has to be done in the initial musical arrangement where you try not to have all the instruments and vocals in the same octave, reverb which separates things behind and in front of each other and EQ which separates instruments by cutting and boosting different frequencies. Lots of permutations!!
 
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