Piano panned hard L and R, does it cover things in the centre?

alexvdbroek

alexvdbroek

New member
I have and will be mixing alot of music for piano and voice.

The piano has 2 mics and the voice 1.

If I pan the piano hard L and R and get a nice phantom center, will this effectively sound like its coming out of the center and inhibit my vocal? Or do we somehow hear the piano coming from 'around' the vocal.

Thanks
A.
 
It *should* sound like it's coming from the center to some extent. Just about every mix has 80% of the energy in the mid info and maybe 20% in the side. A stereo spaced-pair piano is going to have more in the side info (perhaps 40-50%), but it shouldn't sound like there's some giant gaping hole in the piano just to make the vocal 'more centered' --

One thing to certainly consider -- If the whole thing doesn't sound quite good *in mono* it's not going to sound too hot panned wide...
 
alexvdbroek said:
I have and will be mixing alot of music for piano and voice.

The piano has 2 mics and the voice 1.

If I pan the piano hard L and R and get a nice phantom center, will this effectively sound like its coming out of the center and inhibit my vocal? Or do we somehow hear the piano coming from 'around' the vocal.

Thanks
A.
Click to expand...

try it and see...you never know unless you try. I never pan things hard left and hard right, once summed to mono, you get some pretty crucial volume loss then. I personally would do what sounds best to me, but I would start panning them about 45% each way (L-R), not hard right.
 
plus, it seems to me that panning hard left and hard right would make your stereo image impossibly wide. It would be the worlds widest piano!!! So, I dunno, I don't think I would go that wide, but as has been said before, try it and if it doesn't work - change it!
 
nate_dennis said:
plus, it seems to me that panning hard left and hard right would make your stereo image impossibly wide. It would be the worlds widest piano!!!
Click to expand...

A stereo piano recording will probably have a lot of common information in both channels, so fully panned won't automatically sound unnaturally wide. It really depends on how it's recorded.
 
alexvdbroek said:
I have and will be mixing alot of music for piano and voice.

The piano has 2 mics and the voice 1.

If I pan the piano hard L and R and get a nice phantom center, will this effectively sound like its coming out of the center and inhibit my vocal? Or do we somehow hear the piano coming from 'around' the vocal.

Thanks
A.
Click to expand...

Try it and see. Thousands of recordings of piano and voice were done before stereo recording was popular, so there's no reason you can't get a good mix with things panned or not panned. Believe it or not, you can hear two different things coming from the same place at the same time.
 
bouldersoundguy said:
Try it and see. Thousands of recordings of piano and voice were done before stereo recording was popular, so there's no reason you can't get a good mix with things panned or not panned. Believe it or not, you can hear two different things coming from the same place at the same time.
Click to expand...

^^^^^ this ^^^^^

There's PLENTY of amazing sounding mono recordings with lots of stuff going on.
 
If you are looking to push your piano far left and right to have more of an empty center for you vocals try this.

Pan your mics hard left and right and have them both going to one bus. Then use a stereo widening effect on the bus to push Left and Right even farther out. What DAW are you using?
 
Yeah, I did spaced stereo pair on a baby grand for Off the Spring, and it doesn't sound "impossibly wide" at all. Still lots of information in the middle, but it floats around. The entire piano reverberates every note, so a bass note won't only come out of the bass microphone, it'll come out the entire piano.
 
alexvdbroek said:
I have and will be mixing alot of music for piano and voice.

The piano has 2 mics and the voice 1.

If I pan the piano hard L and R and get a nice phantom center, will this effectively sound like its coming out of the center and inhibit my vocal? Or do we somehow hear the piano coming from 'around' the vocal.

Thanks
A.
Click to expand...

try it and see. it'll take all of 3 seconds to implement a pan and take a quick listen.
 
Thanks Guys

That helps. I iill keep this stuff in mind.
I will be using two mics to record the piano. Yes the piano does have alot of rich harmonics so I will be careful where I end up panning it all.

I am using Reaper and ProTools.

Thanks
A.
 
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