stereo image placement

[dawg711]

id like to get some info on where you believe the stereo image placement of a typical band consisting of drums, bass, guitars and vocals are to be. personally i believe this and eq to be the most important part of mixing. also does anyone use stacking of guitars? if so what is your method?

 

[Chibi Nappa]

Man, it varies depending on the song. But a generic starting point is drums panned according to the image in the overheads, bass n' vox center, one guitar hard right and the other hard left.

 

[DrRay11]

Man, it varies depending on the song. But a generic starting point is drums panned according to the image in the overheads, bass n' vox center, one guitar hard right and the other hard left.

Yeah, that's definitely the place to start. Stacking guitars? I do that on occasion, but like Chibi said, it depends on the song. I'm a fan of combining clean electric and acoustic guitars sometimes.

I've also put two hard distorted guitars panned far right and two panned far left. It has its uses sometimes, but it's just a part of the experimentation and sound you are going for.

 

[grimtraveller]

I think one of the problems I have is not that there is a supposed norm, but that people assume one and therefore, anything outside of that norm gets met with a certain negativity before even leaving the runway.
I'm aware that formulas work. I've got no problem with that, obviously they do. But the formulas {ie, whatever is thought to be 'typical'} are only one aspect of a bigger picture and in my opinion lead to a snobbishness that ends up quite ironic.
There are plenty of ways to mix a song. And listening to music over the last 60 years reveals a huge scope of what can be done with the 'stereo image'.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Put everything where you're imagination wants them to go.

The things mentioned in here such as panning drums in a "natural" L-R or R-L spread and hard-panning guitars are popular recommendations on forums such as this, but go ahead and listen to all the popular, classic commercially-released songs out there starting with Elvis an the Beatles and going all the way through all the years to today, and you'll find very few recordings that are actually set up that way. There's nothing wrong with those suggestions, they'll work; they're just nowhere near as used in the real world as the Internet forums would have you believe.

There are no standards or even common placements. General guidelines which apply is that you tend to not want to throw a lot of extra-low frequencies off to the sides because the lower frequencies don't have the directionality or "locatability" of the higher frequencies, so there's no advantage to pushing them off to the edges. Add to that that putting the LFs nearer to the center means that you can get both woofers working to push them.

Another guideline is to keep instruments of similar registers panned away from each other if they are not playing the same line. If they're meant to be stacked to give you a compound sound, that's a different story, of course. But if you have, say, two guitars or a guitar and a keyboard or something similar that are playing separate lines in the arrangement of similar keys or timbres, you might want to make sure they are panned apart so they don't wind up masking or muddying each other.

There are other some such generalities that can be mentioned, but most of them are pretty common sense. But other than that, you have a blank canvas in front of you. Paint the picture you want to paint. Imagine in your head how you think it will sound if you do this or that and start working out at least a basic starting game plan before you even start up your DAW.

You cant play a song on an instrument without an idea of what you're going to play, and you cant mix a song on a DAW without an idea of what you're going to mix. And there are no specific recipes for where things should go for songs in general, any more than there is a specific recipe for what notes should go where in general. If there were, every song would be the same song.

G.

 

[NYMorningstar]

You cant play a song on an instrument without an idea of what you're going to play, ...G.

I respectfully disagree with you about that. Take yourself out of the equation and the song will write itself. Let the spirit be your guide.

 

[grimtraveller]

I respectfully disagree with you about that. Take yourself out of the equation and the song will write itself. Let the spirit be your guide.

I've disagreed with you on this point before and 13 or so months on, I still do. I think I know where you're coming from on that, but the reality is that people write songs. In many different ways, yeah. Under different inspirations, yeah. From time to time inexplicably, certainly. Some seem to come really easilly, logically and smoothly, while some are like the point of giving birth {if what the experience of most of the women I know is indeed accurate}. But songs do not write themselves any more than letters or stories do. As a metaphor, the statement may have validity. Not as a reality.

 

[Captain Ego]

Music parts write themselves because we have so much data built up in our heads that we naturally hear the way things resolve, naturally play in a muscle-memory way so even if we don't know the notes, our fingers just go to stuff. It's all coming from 'work' though. If you listen to enough 1-4-5 from your jam buddy and you hear the other guy play 1-4... your instinct will be to play 5. It's all "work" in the sense that you just hear things you have already heard, note relations you have already learned, rearrranged and flpped around somehow. The only way to make it truly instinctual is to have an instrument so utterly out of tune it isn't even playing in any discernable key any more... then see how well the "music writes itself".
That said...

I like to pan the way I would want to hear it 10 feet from the stage at a show. If a guy is standing over here with his amp, he wont be "hard pan" over there, because I'm also hearing the mains, but his guitar will be a little more on that side because I'm hearing his stage volume too. Drums are all close to center, as is voice and bass (because it doesn't really matter where the bass amp is, its just kind of everywhere live in my experience - unless they have some way of panning something to either floor/ceiling, in which case I'd pan it Floor). Guitar amps can each have their stage side, but I hate lopsided feeling in headphones. Unless its a doubled track for thickness, I don't want an individual sound to be panned hard. For special effects parts its cool, but throughout a whole song, I would hate to have a guitar solo all the way in my right ear ad his rhythm guitar buddy all the way in my left. Makes me want to tear off an ear and just hear it mono its so annoying, its like it physically feels like my head is lopsided when I have something far panned.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

I respectfully disagree with you about that. Take yourself out of the equation and the song will write itself. Let the spirit be your guide.

There's some truth in that, but I was referring to playing a song, not writing one.

One does not sit down to play "Greensleeves" without pretty much knowing what notes they are going to play. Similarly, one should not sit down to mix their band's version of "Greensleeves" without pretty much knowing which notes by whom they are going to put where - or at least what their original plan for that is.

Just like a musician can improvise while playing, so can an engineer. But they should have some basic original plan on which they can improvise, otherwise it's just wasting time. If you have no idea of what you want to do, there's nothing to do. You don't just sit down in front of your DAW and say, "OK, now why am I here?"

And the best answer to that "why", IMHO, is to start with the arrangement and mentally set up a basic mix that "supports" it; by that I mean a basic mix plan in your head where one part of the arrangement doesn't sonically get in the way of another, especially in the signature elements of the song. As figuring that, figure whether you want a quasi-realistic type of soundstge, like Capt. Ego says when he says he wants it to sound like the listener is in the audience viewing the band on a stage, or whether you want to paint a totally abstract and artificial sound space, a la an Alan Parsons. Both are valid general options.

Use those guidelines, combined with however your muse tickles your ribs that day, as the basic "plan" with which you can start you mix plan, and just roll from there. And don't wait until after you record and are ready to start the mix to start this process. This is something you should be making at least mental notes about before you even start recording, as you're arranging the song and practicing it.

IMHO, YMMV, NBC, TMC, HSN, ETC.

G.

 

[miroslav]

I do agree that there isn't a norm that needs to be followed, but at the same time, I think there are norms that come in the form of the current music vibe that we all hear and experience every day, and that does change over time, so like - what was somewhat of a "norm" for snare drum sound in the '80s ain't the same today...etc.

You don't have to follow any norm...but...the song you are doing will often "beg" for a direction of sorts or even dictate that direction to you, so in that regard, if it is similar in some ways to an earlier "norm" you can use that as your guide but not as your rule.

I've often said/felt that each song after a certain production point comes to life...the "Frankenstein" effect if you will, where inanimate matter comes alive. Once that happens to a song, I like to let it go where it wants to go...though of course, you do have the power to guide it any way you like, but in many cases you will find it WILL go where it wants to and/or should go, by way of it's structure, it's arrangement, it's intent...etc...etc.

 

[clivus]

regarding backing vocals--I tend to pan them L and R but leave the lead vocal in the middle.

 

[bouldersoundguy]

I just mixed a song that was originally planned to have a sort of early stereo panning with rhythm section on one side, color instruments on the other and vocals in the center. But listening to the song it sounded more like a 30s song than a 50s/early 60s song, so I bailed on the early stereo panning and stuck everything down the center, even making the reverbs mono. I've never before deliberately mixed something in mono (except live on a mono system) but it just sounded right to me.

Normally when mixing a CD project I will pan things consistently. Most of the time I gravitate toward an idealized literal interpretation of placement.