Panning question

  • Thread starter Thread starter lapieuvre
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lapieuvre

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Hi,

I am currently mixing a rock demo. On panning I put vocals, bass, kick center. I got an advice to move a little (2-3% right or left) the voice and bass. What do you think of that?

Lapieuvre
 
Experiment with the panning and reverb to set things where they sound good to you. There is no set rule on where to pan anything, be creative, have fun.
 
lapieuvre said:
Hi,

I am currently mixing a rock demo. On panning I put vocals, bass, kick center. I got an advice to move a little (2-3% right or left) the voice and bass. What do you think of that?

Lapieuvre
Click to expand...
These guys are right when they say there are no set rules and try stuff to see what sounds good and go with it.

But to explain the usual reasons behind the kind of pan tweak you're asking about. When you have kick bass and vocal all dead center - somthing 90% of us are knee-jerk, almost instinctively ready to do - you can have undesireable competition a couple of ways.

The first way is that the bass and the kick can tend to get in each other's hair a bit. They both ride in the low end of the spectrum and they both provide fundamental rhythm to most modern Western music. As such they can wind up kind of covering and muddying each other up. Sometimes just a slight seperation between the two of just a couple of degrees can help (along with other tricks like EQ cuts or dlight delays).

The second competition can be between the rhythm section and the vocals. Because the kick/bass rhythm combo often provide the fundamental rhythmic baseline of the song and at the same time they need lots of voltage just by virtue of their low frequencies, they often get a lot of prominance in the mix. The lead vocals, haveing the obvious importance they have, also get prominance in the mix. Throw all three in the exact same pan location and you wind up having the vast majority of the songs energy coming right down the middle of the pipe like a Nolan Ryan fastball. This can lead to a boring mix. Push them a couple of degrees apart so they are still basically centered but somewhat seperated can increase the clarity of each and add interest to the mix. At least that's the theory.

HTH,

G.
 
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