Panning Question

lga5824

lga5824

It's Just My Opinion
Is it typical to have specific instruments that you pan to the right or left? I've just been recording keys and voxs and doing both through mono and keeping both in the middle. I'm working on a new song with drums, congas, keys and vox, and I'm going to have a few layers of vocal harmonies in there. So far, everything is mono and in the middle, except I put the congas slightly to the right. Is there a technique that's kind of standard or should I just play around and do it according to my own taste?

Thanks!

Jen
 
lga5824 said:
Is there a technique that's kind of standard or should I just play around and do it according to my own taste?
Click to expand...

The answers here are yes and yes.

Typically (though not exclusively), bass, drums and vocals go down the middle, other instruments are panned left and right according to taste.

Ctreating a stereo image is tricky when it's just vocals and a piano (or guitar). You can increase the apparent width of the sound stage by recording the keyboard in stereo (most contemporary ones have stereo or mono outputs). This puts vocals in the centre with the keys kind of surrounding it. You can also use stereo reverbs to fill the extreme left and right of the sound stage.

You can put high and low congas slightly left and right, and similarly, you can spread the kit left and right as well.

There are, in my view, two primary rules:
1 arrange the instruments so that there is a good balance (of dynamics as well as sonically) between left and right.
2 arrange the instruments so that a listener can make reasonable sense of the performing stage*.

You will get an idea of what to do by listening closely to the instrumentation of your favourite tracks.

* I posted this, then reread it, and realised I have contradicted myself. I said "arrange the instruments so that a listener can make reasonable sense of the performing stage", but earlier, said "You can put high and low congas slightly left and right, and similarly, you can spread the kit left and right as well." When you examine this advice, you will see that this puts a drummer and a conga player both in the centre of the stage, and it might put the congas so far aprt that a conga player wouldn't be able to play it! Well, all's fair in love and music, and rule 3 could be "break rule 2 if you want to, and it still sounds good".
 
I found this very helpful: "bass, drums and vocals go down the middle, other instruments are panned left and right according to taste".

I was almost going to pan all of the instruments to the left or right, except for the vocals, hah.
 
or do what you want. Even crazy shit like The Beatles by panning everything hard left or right, even drums, vocals, and bass :D

I personally like wide stereo fields, I pan my drum overheads far left and right, I even have my snare mic off center a tad to give it that extra room. For my current rock band, its a trio, so I have guitar on one side and bass on the other, even though most people prefer bass in the center.
 
My opinion of panning is that you want to spread your instruments around to create a more 3-d sound (you can also create depth with varying reverb levels). However, you don't want to get so involved in makeing your "stage" that you detract from the music.

I personally can't stand the Beatles' "pan everything to one side exclusively" sound. That effect only works in optimal cases where the listener hears the sound on a decent stereo system. If the listener only hears one side of things (busted system, only using one earbud, etc.), there's no way to hear all of the music.
 
Mileage vary's but what I usually do is kick, bass guitar and main vox up the middle. Everything else panned wherever they sound right.

If I'm tracking keys, they'll be hard panned cuz they're stereo.
If my rhythm guitars are the main melody, they'll be panned somewhere around 2:30 and 10:30...ish.
Drum OH's tend to be around 4:00 and 8:00.
Snare close to middle but usually a skosh to the right.
Hard panning comes into play when the song calls for it... or for an effect... or whenever the hell I want. ;)

I really don't have a set rule for panning, just whatever sounds good at mixtime.
 
The beatles panning thing...im not sure they knew what they where doing when stereo first came about. But, genius is knowing when to quit, right after you have screwed things up to the best of your ability.

The most important thing you can do while mixing is to clearly identify the focus for the listener at any given moment. P.T. Barnum said "never overestimate the intelligence of your audience." While this statement seems derogatory, and I agree to some point that it is, I have found it to be very true.
 
Good advice here and like most said, it comes down to taste with some restraints dictated by conventional expectations, like bass and drums centered, etc. Listen to some commercially released music that closely resembles what you're doing and see how they handle the panning.

There are other things you can do to create a 3d stage... like applying more reverb and lowering the highs on some instruments can give the effect that they are farther back on a stage. It takes a lot of experimentation, but that's half the fun.

I'm no expert, but others here are...

btw: in contrast to gecko zzed, I'm not a fan of splitting the congas L and R. It feels like a ping pong game when wearing headphones. :D

Cheers,
 
A lot of the early 60s hard panning, including some early Beatles, was not necessarily by choice, but rather because they were using early gear either with no real panning control other than a 2- or 3-position panning switch (L-R or L-C-R).

Jen, It's fairly common to throw kick drum or bass at or near the center because low frequencies are not directional the way high frequencies are (and therefore there's little stereo advantage to panning low frequencies compare to high frequencies), plus that puts the low freqs to both loudspeakers evenly, effectively doubling the size of the woofers being used to drive them. This doesn't make it a necessity to do so, but it's not a bad idea as a place to start for now.

Next, do you want a "naturalistic" stereo image, like if you were in the audience watching the band play in front of you? Or do you want something more artificial but more sonicly creative? Or maybe a little of both? Close your eyes and play back the song in your head (or in real life) and just start imagining what would sound interesting.

Sometimes the arrangement can help define the mix. If you have an interesting arrangement happening, as the arrangement progresses the sounds will move with the key instruments' locations in space. When that piano comes in, will it sound interesting if it comes in over here as compared to the rest of the arrangement, kind of moving the listener's focus? Or maybe over there will be better? And so forth.

Will this instrument sound too much like that instrument, and if they are panned close they will step on each other too much? If so, then plan on separating at least somewhat in the pan space. OTOH, if you're running out of room or are stuck stacking a lot of instruments on top of each other, then try to group or stack those instruments that sounds sonically different enough where they can play on or near each other but still shine through with their own identity.

If you follow these guidelines and your panning scheme winds up being very much like someone else's or some "typical" scheme, so be it, at least you came to that decision for the right reasons. But PLEASE don't just look for "what is everyone else doing?" because there's a million too many "everyone else's" out there, and you won't be doing yourself any favors by just getting in line and just becoming one million and one.

G.
 
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i did some tests on recent pop-rock songs, and they all seem to share the same panning format....

Snare, kick drum, bass guitar, main vocals - panned center
toms - panned around 50-60% left/right
hi hat - panned about 65-70% left or right
over heads - panned 75-80% left/right
backing guitars - panned 80-90% left and right

there is a big gap from center to 50%. But i guess thats how they get that "big stereo spread sound". Thats were things like "vocal doubles" are placed if you have 2 to 3 layers of lead vocals to thicken the main vocal. possibly "lead/solo guitars", odd items like a "cowbell", piano, guitar fills, etc.

its all subjective to what you want it to be overall and how you envisioned it to go....
 
Some people use a very quick delay on vocals, and spread them hard right/left. Make sure the volume of them in the same so they still feel center.
 
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