For most songs, the vocals and lyrics shine the brightest, so it makes sense for them to sit front and center remember the visualization exercise. However, every rule has its exceptions. For choruses and main verses, vocals should stay in the middle. The Beatles, Alice Cooper, The Doors, and many more bands and artists have material with lead vocals slightly or prominently panned left or right.
These daring mixing moves can result in distinct sounding songs and passages. An easy way to experiment with panning vocals is by using mix automation. This way you can mess around with swirling vocals left and right just to hear how they move along the horizontal axis of the mix. But even in non-experimental passages, panning vocals can have a major impact. When it comes to doubling vocals like with rhythm guitars , panning both tracks opposite one another can add even more space to the mix.
This technique often makes choruses stand out especially. Accounting for this defines what mixing and mastering are all about, of course.
But when it comes to panning, always switch to mixing in mono every now and then to hear how well your moves convert. Additionally, headphone tips such as putting on some different sets of headphones and earbuds to hear how the stereo image sounds without the crosstalk of stereo monitors are really beneficial.
Panning instruments and vocals can significantly enhance a mix. The hardest part is knowing where to go, and how far. While these decisions ultimately come down to preference and experimentation, these six tips can help you get started.
The stereo field is open to you, so get creative and fill it with a great sounding mix! You must be logged in to post a comment. Remember me. Sign Up Lost Your Password? Log In Lost Your Password? Lost your password? If, for example, a listener has a dodgy speaker, or has placed one behind the sofa, a panned vocal could be lost or compromised.
Therefore having the most important thing in both channels ensures that the core of the song always remains intact. Bass guitar, and usually the bass and snare drums in a kit, are also placed fairly centrally these days, so that the punchy sounds which tend to drive a track along are evenly spread, giving the recording a unifying balance in both speakers.
Panning low bass sounds centrally also allows a vinyl record to be bassier without causing the needle to jump. Other instruments are less unsettling when panned to extreme positions, and tend to be scattered across the stereo spread to increase the perceived width of the sound picture. In recent years, surround sound has forced engineers to choose between a number of different mixing strategies, each one suggesting a different way of spreading a mix across the array of speakers.
When mixing a band, for example, in 5. The rear speakers are then used for ambience effects, emulating the reflections the listener might hear from a concert hall's walls. More experimental mix engineers have tried placing instruments, and even separate notes and beats from instruments, all around the room, arguing that a recording can be a unique listening experience, not necessarily a realistic reproduction of a live event.
Even though there are strong arguments supporting both these examples of mixing approaches, in my opinion, it is likely that over time surround mixing will become more and more standardised, and the resulting recordings progressively more conservative, just like the development of stereo mixing.
When it comes down to it, the vocals are the face of the music. They are the element of the music that most people connect with strongly. Producers should remember the importance of vocals if they want to be successful. Of course, producers and instrumentalists are used to listening to all the instruments and thinking about how they work together. Vocals connect to audiences in exactly the same way actors do in TV and movies. Producers have a broad range of tools to use vocals effectively.
As far as the audience is concerned, the producer is like the Wizard of Oz, the magic behind the curtain, with all sorts of effects at his or her disposal. And one of the simplest but most powerful effects is panning. Until the s, recorded music tended to take a mono approach. Most people listened to music on radios or record players with a single speaker. Music was recorded and mixed in a single channel. Loads of musical innovations became available, like guitar amps, reverb, distortion, wah, early synthesizers, and much more.
One of these changes was the widespread adoption of home stereo systems. Any fan of s music has probably noticed some bizarre approaches throughout the s. Check out the original stereo release of Lady Madonna for instance, with the piano hard-panned left and the bass and drums hard-panned right.
Decisions like this seem strange now, but at the time, they were used to show off the sound separation. Sure, you still have the freedom to hard pan the entire bass and drum tracks. But even though the Beatles got away with it, it will be perceived as an unusual artistic choice these days.
Tom Petty tracks are gorgeously mixed for the most part, and they are an excellent reference to learn about mixing. Here are the modern panning standards:. As I mentioned above, lead vocals should be front and center. Panning them is almost always a mistake. Most smart phones, tablets, and computers, as well as many bluetooth speakers, are either mono, or have very little stereo separation.
Important elements such as lead vocals and snare drum are central so they can translate unfailingly to mono systems. However, there are many situations where panning vocals can be an excellent decision- read on for examples.
I like to use examples to show off some different approaches. This way you can hear how different approaches to panning backup vocals lead to different effects.
There are several backup vocal tracks layered there. But they are spread across the stereo field- my guess is that some hard center, some panned a little, and some hard-panned. And when the backups are added to the chorus later in the song, they provide a huge lift that keeps the song moving forward.
The lead vocals in For The Longest Time are dead center, but the backups are spread naturally. None of the harmonies are panned hard, but they are spread naturally across the stereo field. You can hear this whenever a track ad-libs, sometimes more in the right channel, sometimes more in the left.
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