advice on panning

[Mindful]

Hello o mighty techno production forum
I could do with a little extra advice and insperation on panning please
I kind of know what im doing but a little extra help from you clever peeps would be greatly appreciated.
one question in perticular how extreme left to right could i pan somthing EXAMPLE if i pan anything all the way to one side it seems to sound wrong.
Thanks in advance.

[auditory hallucinations]

There is a book, urg I've forgotten the exact name, The Art of Mixing (or something like that)…it's worth hunting down on-line.

It represents sound with these big fat balls, and shows you how to position them in the "box", which is the space between your speakers.

Worth getting as it gives you a helpful way to visualise this kind of stuff.

[Mindful]

yeh cheers bud will see if i can hunt that down.

[xfive]

It's usually not a good idea to pan things hard unless you have something to offset it on the other side. ;)

I've seen that ball diagram .. its pretty neat.

[Mindful]

It's usually not a good idea to pan things hard unless you have something to offset it on the other side. ;)

thanks xfive ;)
how do you mean? pad hard left synth hard right for instance?

whats the furthest most of you would pan somthin?

[DJZeMigL]

If U r playing mono sources and placing them on a mix I wouldn't go more then 80% to either side u choose!

But If u have 2 mono source for a stereo sound (like for instance having one mono input from the left output of a synth and another mono channel with the right channel from the same synth), then U should pan hard left and hard right (meaning 100% left & Right).

Z

[xfive]

It's usually not a good idea to pan things hard unless you have something to offset it on the other side. ;)

thanks xfive ;)
how do you mean? pad hard left synth hard right for instance?

whats the furthest most of you would pan somthin?

Well I mean lets say you have a synth stab thats panned 20-25% to the right... you could have a different synth that covers roughly the same frequencies panned 20-25% to the left...

It's not really a rule or anything but if you have something panned too obviously one way or another.. if nothing plays off of it or with it, the track will seem misbalanced.. thats what you were saying about it sounding "wrong" ;)

I personally pan almost everything around in one way or another (except bass and kick of course which are kept in mono)... it's a must to keep everything audible and non-cluttered.. some of the more driving elements I may keep centered..

[Basil Rush]

Yeah, whoever said 80% left or right i reckon is onto something especially if you're using lots of reverb 'cause it makes the reverb sound more natural to be wider than the track.

probably more important to keep your constant driving stuff within this 80% kind of bracket

on the other hand, pads you can pan outside the speakers a little with some stereo expansion if you choose to use them and some special effects work wonders with a bit of this too.

and if you were going for a drier mix I don't see why you shouldn't use all the available space, sometimes it's fun.

(I mixed an acoustic album for someone recently and by the time they'd dropped the last track down they must have been well pissed and their usually excellent timing had gone a bit so I stuck the lead vocal on the left speaker and the restof the band on the right speaker till half way through and filtered the lead vocal to be tiny. the band seemed dead cuffed with it and it's really quite enjoyable to listen to ... not that you could do that with must dance music but it illustrates the point)

An awful lot of dance music is mixed in what someone once described as "big mono" where most of the sounds are pretty much down the middle or just smeared with pitch or delay tricks across the stereo field. Makes things sound posh quite quickly but gets a bit boring...

[Evil G]

great tips you guys!

i think it's probably worthwile to check the final stereo mix by merging the channels back into mono and giving it a listen to make sure that there is no phase cancellation.

and aren't most rigs at parties run in mono?

[Greg Dee]

yea i thought the same G.

[AcidMutant]

I saw an interesting article on audio illusions - if you take a bassline and have it say going:
C2, C3, C2, C3 and pan this hard left,
then take the inverse - i.e. it going:
C3, C2, C3, C2 and pan hard right

- so that the same note are playing simultaniously on both sides but and octave apart and alternating octaves left/right each beat.

People get the illusion that the bassline is bouncing between speakers, well it works on headphones anyhow, not sure on speakers!

[AcidMutant]

great tips you guys!

i think it's probably worthwile to check the final stereo mix by merging the channels back into mono and giving it a listen to make sure that there is no phase cancellation.

Dolby Prologic uses phase invertion to encode signals to the rear speaker!

[Basil Rush]

Too much phase inversion though and the mix changes dramatically in mono. Generally you only get phasing problems where you've done anti-phase based stereo expansion stuff or you've got a really weird synth patch.

Sometimes if you're using a lot of outboard you coudl have a cable arse about tit in which case you may get an almost total cancellation if you're running from a stereo source, these you can usually hear if you've got speakers set up half decently as it'll sound a bit sick and disembodied.

Wicked fun to use that kind of trick to make a sound sound like it's touching the back of your head but don't do it on an important soundin the mix 'cause like G says some (many) rigs are run in mono and it might just vanish.

[Scott Kemix]

Panning in sx? Anybody got any techniques using this program with an outboard desk?

[Mindful]

Thanks for the advice everybody got exactly the answers I was looking for and more.
Will put the advice in to practice later(after some sleep perhaps)and hopfully come up with positive results.

:clap: nice one people!!!

[RDR]

In terms of phase cancellation it is very important that you constrain the bass to somewhere in the middle, a lot of PA systems are in mono, especially smaller ones.

The other point to remember is that the even if you want to play with the panning on your bass, it wont produce the sort of effect you would like. This is due to the properties of the human ear. Below a certain frequency (i forget which one, around 300hz maybe) our ears are less good at localisation, this means that although the sound might be coming from the left at 100hz our ears are not good at pin-pointing the direction.

Couple this with the fact that when printing on to vinyl the bass must be constrained as this will cause the needle to skip out of the groove.

There is also the fairly obvious fact that we (meaning I in this case) want as much bass power as possible from the system we are working on. Not to wash the system out, but to ensure that our bass is being reproduced effectively. Making sure that your bass is eminating from both speakers means we get more power!!!! mwahahahahah!

there is a free plugin called BassLane which can constrain the bass frequencies that can cause vinyl problems.

There is a technique whereby the upper harmonics are distorted on the basss line, this gives better definition to the tune of the bass without the producer having to raise to volume of the bass.

hope this helps

[loopdon]

As dodge, said
Basslane comes in handy:


Basslane is a free audio effect for VST compatible hosts. It's a simple, yet very handy little utility to control the stereo field of lower frequencies in your audio material. Allows you to define the processed frequency range while using several monitoring options, and to tweak how much you want it squezed.

What is this useful for?

• Regain tightness in the bottom of your mix by preventing kick drums and bass lines flying around all over the stereo field.

• Drumtracks mixed from multiple sources, or processed with delay, reverb etc will often just sound confusing if the kickdrum isn't centered. Just drop Basslane on the track.

• Experiment with effects on various tracks without losing definition and focus in the bass region.

• Very useful when mastering for vinyl records.


http://www.otiumfx.com/downloads.php

http://www.otiumfx.com/files/otiumFX...0VST%201.0.zip

[RDR]

:roll: I should have included the link....

I karate myself in disgust!

[Craig McW]

Something I have been doing, which may be a no no, is with my kick, plugging it into 2 channels and panning one hartd left and the other hard right. Creates a very fat kick.

I've never had anythign pressed so I don't know alot of the ins and outs, but is what I'm doing here wrong?

[loopdon]

:roll: I should have included the link....

I karate myself in disgust!

aaah, no problem, i just thought that would make yer post complete