Panning
Usually, the most problematic area of the sound field is the center, as this is normally the busiest place within a mix. It is advisable to keep the kick, snare, bass, and vocal in the center as they provide the music with a solid grounding and help aid the rhythm (although these rules can often be broken to great effect). For every other instrument, however, it is advisable to position them either side of the center.
Be careful not to pan too aggressively, as the instruments still need to blend together to make an integrated mix.
To maintain balance within a mix, for every element panned one way, another element should be panned the other
Bass heavy instruments should generally live at or near the centre.
If you want to feature an instrument more in a mix, you can try going direct on one side and a heavily modulated version of it on the other side
- Microshift is good for this (just make sure to verify what it sounds like in mono).
If we want to bring an instrument more into prominence, we can do so with panning, by moving an instrument that was previously panned over to one side to the center. Imagine the first verse of our song was driven by mandolin, so we kept it centered. Then in the second verse, the lead guitar (which was 50%L) takes more focus, so we move the mandolin slightly off center, and move the lead guitar to the center. Finally, in the 3rd verse we want to feature the banjo, so we move the lead guitar back to where it was at 50%L, and move the banjo to the center (which was 50%R)
- To bring further emphasis to the instrument we are panning center, it's a reasonable idea to increase the volume of that section as well.
If everything is all stereo all the time, then you miss out on the opportunity to highlight things by using stereo. That is, purposefully make things sounds more "mono" during less exciting parts of the song, and widen it with stereo during exciting parts (e.g. chorus)
- Consider using panning to make the chorus sound more "stereo" (ie. have more width) than the verses (e.g. pan OHs more toward centre during verse)
If one instrument is panned toward one side for verse1, try panning it on the opposite side for verse2
Double tracking
When double tracking instruments with panning, if we pan them hard left/right, we make those tracks sound more prominent. If we instead want those tracks to support the main track, then we should consider panning them less hard (say ~50% left/right)
Pan law
As we pan a sound further away from centre, its perceived volume drops.
- Therefore, panning does not just operate on the horizontal dimension of the soundscape, but also depth.
The pan law setting determines the rate at which the volume of a track appears to decrease as we pan further from the center.
Types of panning
Panning techniques
Avoid hard panning parts that are very critical to a song, because in mono it won't sound that great.
- note: this doesn't mean you can't do it, but you will drown out the instrument, and it will need to be brought back using some other kind of mixing technique.
Double Tracking
If you don't want to actually double track and instrument but want the benefits, you could pan the track hard left, send to a bus with ~20ms delay, then pan that hard right.
Bookend Panning
What if we want to create a spatial relationship between 2 instruments, but there arises a problem of one of the instruments drowning out the other? The obvious solution is to pan them away from each other, but what if we want to (or need to) keep them relatively near each other on the left-right spectrum?
- ex. if we have mandolin and banjo parts, the mandolin will naturally overwhelm the banjo, since the mandolin has higher frequencies.
If we had a guitar panned left, a banjo panned center (as it is meant to be the main rhythmic instrument) and a mandolin center-right, what we could do is add banjo sounds just to the right of the Mandolin, so that the mandolin is wrapped by the banjo on either side. This prevents the mandolin from overwhelming the banjo.
Microshifting
Microshifting is a technique to widen the stereo image of a sound
- Take one stereo track, pan it center and keep it there.
- Next, duplicate that track twice (so you now have three versions) and put a pitch shifting plugin on both copies. Pan one hard left and the other hard right.
- Now, use the pitch shifter to pitch one copy down a few cents (5-10 cents is common) and pitch the other copy up the same amount of cents.
In Reaper
See p.71 of ReaMix