Panning & stereo panorama

[moggadeet]

Hi everyone,

I am producing a new song these days and this time I am trying to delay the decissions on stereo placement, panning and width until I have all tracks leveled, filtered and equalized, sounding fine so far. Now that I am ready to start placing things in the stereo panorama, I always start being unsure about it: should I pan to the extremes or not, should I pan the hats, should I narrow the stereo width of the clap layered with the snare, of the snare, of both? The amount of choices is overwhelming and I do not really feel that I have the competence yet to evaluate all the aspects of the consequences of my choices.

What is your approach? How do you go about it? If you have some references about it (articles, video) I would appreciate if you would link them so I can study them.

Best regards,

C.

[RandomSkratch]

There's definitely no rule stating you need to pan anything. Does it sound better when you do? Keep it. With regards to extreme left/right if you are going to do that, save it for special effect type things, temporarily. It might sound really unnatural to have an element hard left the whole song.

I'd use panning to either move two similar elements away from each other to make space or to create simulated width.

Honestly though, just because the controls are there doesn't mean you need to use them! [emoji846]


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[selig]

Basically, I pan to make the mix sound interesting.

I often hard pan something IF there is a similar instrument to hard pan on the opposite side and IF there is some delay or reverb to spread things out a bit. Otherwise, I pretty much use five positions in the panorama.

Also, I pan things pretty early on to establish the stereo field, if only because the line between tracking and mixing is blurred these days. But I also change panning at any point in the process if I find it’s not working out as well as another panning option.

I don’t pan to “clear up” anything in my mix, because I try not to create those types of issues in the first place. That one approach alone makes my life MUCH easier (not creating a problem in the first place).


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[RandomSkratch]

Listen to Selig, not me [emoji16].

He definitely knows his stuff!


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[Loque]

I would do some basic panning decisions before final leveling, because the audible level changes. The rest just happens and the decisions make your song. A rule of thumb for me is: not everything must be super wide and use the stereo field as a 2d painting for drawing.