Basic Panning
The stereo field
Stereophonic sound, commonly called stereo, is the reproduction of sound, using two independent audio channels, through a pair of widely separated speaker systems, in such a way as to create a pleasant and natural impression of sound heard from various directions as in natural hearing. Ironically it is important to realise first that much of what we do when mixing for stereo tends to be fairly unnatural. In real life, i.e. outdoor, most normal music venues, etc, the levels of reverberation, wind direction, etc, can sometimes make it difficult to determine the positions of the sound sources with any degree of accuracy. You'll usually perceive something about the characteristics of the space you're in, but it'll be difficult or impossible to figure out exactly where specific sounds are coming from. When recording and mixing, we can artificially separate sounds and we can control the amount and qualities of any reverberation that we add later. Most modern music production now takes full advantage of studio technology, the goal being to achieve the most artistically pleasing results, even if they are not necessarily the most technically accurate. With this in mind, let’s look at the basics of mixing for stereo.
Why stereo?
Even though we have witnessed lately a trend to surround 5.1, 7.1, even heard of 11.1???, the stereo format is still the standard when it comes to listening and thus mixing music. Ironically human have had the ability to listen in surround since the beginning. Actually over the years, technology has tried to accommodate this faculty, from mono to stereo, quadrophonia, surround, 5.1, etc… Stereo is the best compromise of them all, it is compatible with mono, thus mixes will still sound reasonably similar on a mono system as what you intended. This is a very important factor since a lot of listeners still listen to music on a small mono portable radio. If mixing in 5.1 for example, the way the listener has positioned the speakers can have a major influence on how your mix is reproduced, where as stereo mixes will be compatible with every system, from top of the range hi-fi to mp3 player.
However, before starting on any considerations of stereo placement, it's important that you get your overall mix balance somewhere close to where it needs to be. Set up an initial balance, it usually helps if everything is panned to mono while you're setting up the initial balance, so that you can see how much natural separation the sounds have. Checking the overall balance from outside the control-room door can also be very revealing.
Basic panning
Once a basic balance has been achieved, you can start to work on the basic panning of the different sounds. The most important thing to bear in mind here is that low-frequency sounds work best when panned to the centre, typically Kick & Bass.
Low frequencies contain most of the energy within a typical mix, so it is best to share the load of reproducing them equally across both speakers. This means bass guitars; bass synths and kick drums shouldn't be allowed to wander very far from the centre of the soundstage. If you have an artistic reason for putting a heavy bass sound to one side of the stereo spectrum, then it's worth knowing that our ears aren’t that great at discerning much in the way of directional information from low-frequencies.
When using Bass synth, be aware of wide stereo sounds, although they can sound very pleasant to the ears, they can cause all sorts of problem at a later stage (i.e. when cutting a vinyl, wide stereo bass can mess up the grooves causing the needle to jump).
Lead vocals are usually positioned in the middle, well this is where you expect the singer to be, and this is the main point of focus in a song.
Backing vocals can go wherever it suits you, though splitting them left and right can be effective in creating a more interesting stereo image.
However, whenever you do split something left and right, take care not to make the image too wide. Spreading sounds between the nine o'clock and three o'clock positions of your pan controls can often work more effectively than when hard panned.
The same applies to the stereo outputs of synths or sound modules. These pseudo-stereo sounds can dominate the sound stage if panned hard to the extremes of the image, it is often tempting to do this with piano and drum-kit patches, but there is the danger in doing this that they end up sounding unfeasibly wide.
Using the pan controls on the console/virtual mixer to narrow stereo signals down often helps improve the focus of the mix enormously, as well as allowing any sounds that you really do want to pan to the extremes to work better in contrast.
NOTE ABOUT PAN CONTROLS:
Most hardware mixers have a majority of mono channels (8, 16, 24, etc.) and sometimes few stereo channels (most have mono only), so when patching a stereo signal, you would usually plug the left output from the device into one mono channel of the mixer (let’s say channel 1) and the right output into channel 2. You would then pan channel 1 to the left and channel 2 to the right. If you wanted to narrow the stereo width of the signal, you would adjust each pan control, for example channel 1 at 9 o’clock and channel 2 at 3 o’clock.
If using your sequencer virtual mixer, you still can apply the same technique, but the procedure will be different, depending on the software you use. We’ll demonstrate in Cubase SX & Logic Pro, as they both deal with issue in very different ways.
A general guideline is that your final mix should sound reasonably balanced on each side, so you don’t end up with one side much louder than the other, unless you want to simulate the 60s “stereo” (which wasn’t), drums & vocals hard panned on one side, bass, piano & guitar on the other, etc… Typically, if you have drums & percussions, you would have kick & snare in the middle, hi hat slightly panned one side, and maybe a tambourine panned opposite the hi hat (to the higher range), the maybe some congas panned one side and bongos the other, etc… The same applies to other instruments, for example Guitars. A typical trick when recording guitars would be to double track it (the exact same part played twice), so in the mix you can pan each track opposite to create a wider stereo sound (as mentioned before don’t always use extreme panning). This is used a lot with backing vocals too.
However, one thing that should always be set to maximum stereo width is the return from any stereo reverb unit and other stereo FX.
Use Your Ears
After all, we’re working with audio here! I’m making mention of this seemingly obvious point because with the plethora of software based EQs and visual displays, it’s easy to begin "looking" at your mix instead of listening to it. Use the visual references to better understand what you’re doing, but listen carefully to the way you’re effecting the sound. Notching out the wrong frequencies will not only fail to accomplish our goal of creating more definition between tracks, but will also rob the track of frequencies that may be important to the character of the sound.
Also because the EQ settings don’t look right (sometimes you may have extreme settings), it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t sound right. I have heard few engineers saying to artists or producers, “no you can’t do that, it’s not technically correct”, if it works musically, then it’s “right”.