BYRN wrote:What about panning? From what I understand you keep the lowers tracks suck as kick and bass toward center. What do I do with leads and rhythms? And compressors, when and where should I use them?
Panning is easy to “reverse engineer”, listening to tracks you like (use phones to make this easier).
As a VERY general rule, the most important tracks are panned center. Another loose rule is that when you pan one thing to one side, you pan a similar thing to the other (for overall ‘balance’).
For example, if you pan a high hat to the left, pan a shaker to the right. If they play a similar pattern they create a nice balanced sound. If they play an alternating pattern you can create a nice “movement” (bouncing back and forth) effect with the higher frequencies.
You can do similar things with a delay: original track panned one side, delay panned the opposite.
How far to pan? Depends, everyone has their own approach. Some pan hard left/right, some never pan past about 50-75% to either side. There are no rules here IMO.
As for panning the low frequencies “center”, this is a technique for vinyl records, which do not respond well to loud low frequencies panned to one side (you can actually force the needle out of the groove if you do this). For all other formats, do what you feel - but note some listeners don’t like important/loud things panned away from center.
Another way to use panning is to record the same instrument twice (double tracked) and pan one left and the other right. Candidates for this are guitars (acoustic and electric) and background vocals.
For synths, there are many patches that use one oscillator panned left and one panned right, with each one detuned in opposite directions (usually a few cents sharp/flat).
Also, don’t forget the possibility of auto-panning, or moving the pan back and forth by an LFO or automation as the track plays, another way to create “movement” in a mix.
In the end, many suggest it’s a good idea to check mixes in mono to make sure overall balances are good and to be sure you’re not relying solely on panning to “de-clutter” your mix. Cluttered mixes are often the result of more than one instrument unintentionally occupying the same frequency range (read about “masking effect”). Sometimes you want two different instruments to “double” each other, but other times you may have accidentally overdubbed too many instruments in the same range. In these cases panning won’t always solve the issue - the solution may be to move one part up/down an octave or more (if it works musically), or worst case delete the part (at least for the section where it’s the most cluttered).
Hope this helps - my answers are in no way meant to be definitive but rather simply to contribute to the overall “knowledge base” on this forum.
Sent from some crappy device using Tapatalk