panning

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Dj17

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can anyone tell me what i should know about panning? are there any basics, like things you must and things you shouldn't do?

and when recording vocals, when you double them up, do you have the mc do them twice and superpose them or do you just use the same part and make it sound like it's doubled? how do you pan the voices?

thanks a lot
 
no rules

especially in hip hop there are no rules for panning.

do what sounds cool to you. but always check with both monitors and headphones in mono and stereo before you make final choices. some things sound cool on speakers, but are annoying on headphones... or the other way around.

there are tons of fun panning tricks... let me throw some out.

extreme panning, like the drums in one speaker, vocalist in the other, then switch it to mono for the chorus.

ping pong delay, i can never get enough of.

personally i hate the whole, duplicated vocal track on right speaker, slightly delayed, original track in left speaker sound.

i love stuff like vocal in center, reverb to right sent through phaser, reverb in left speaker with delay... fun.

a real basic thing about panning which is cool is that if you have two sounds that compete in the same frequency range, you can pan them to different speakers, and hear them both pretty well, whereas if you had them both in the center, they would get muddied up.
 
for most pop[ular] music, the bass and kick are right down the middle, or if not down the middle only slightly off center. since there is so much bass in hip-hop and r&b you need both speakers working together to reproduce that sound energy.

i usually pan the kick slightly left and the bass slightly right so my lead vocal sits right down the middle by itself.

then i start panning instrumentation away from center trying to keep it balanced so that if i have a sound that is 25% left I've got something to balance it 25% right.... then 50%, then 75%, then 100%... or something to that effect. (33%, 66%, 100%)
 
Anyone have additional panning tips or disagree with any of the following? This is interesting.
 
Good info here already.

Here's a panning chart that gives some guidlelines to panning. It depicts acoustic instruments mainly, but similar theory can be applied to synths as well. The chart is a Word document.

I would also add that visualizing a 3 dimensional space behind your monitors is a good idea. Visualize a full band in that space are try to put each player (or instrument) where you would suspect them to be on a sound stage. This helps in creating a realistic image, which is, in most cases, the goal.

Also be careful of extreme pans (very hard right or left). They may sound great on your studio monitors or high end stereo but alot of listening tends to occur on car stereos, cheap boomboxes and PC speakers that are essentially all mono. Check your mix in mono and make sure tracks don't disappear, if they do you panned too hard. Your mixes should sound just as good on mono as they do on stereo.

Stray
 

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Preciate ya STRAY i've been looking for something like that.

I'm not real big on panning myself but I do it to keep things from getting too boring.

One thing I started doing is looking at a few pics of bands and how they setup in a professional enviroment... I remember seeing some setups on bet jazz and that's kinda what I did my parntas RNB cd around. I also peep the tonight show band sometimes.... Basically though it goes Funky song = look at a Funk band... Jazzy cut = Jazz band... Orchestra = Damn they got alot of shit!!! Synthy shit is whatever... That typa thinking. Same thing with reverbs.
 
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