panning and style

[mickomoo]

With regards to panning, in order to help make a convening performance is it absolutely necessary for one to conform to the positioning of instruments relative to the genre (ie: orchestral music's positioning chart, ect)? For that matter, are there recognized "standard" arrangements for other modern genres like rock, jazz, techno, ect. What determines were you pan instruments other than the standards of a genre?

[Calum]

with a drum kit you may wish to pan it in correlation to the different parts in front of the player - the snare slightly to the left, kick in the middle, hi hats to the left, ride to the right etc.

Bass and kick drums are rarely anything but centred (please correct me if i'm wrong). Often a rhythm guitar track might be panned left or right as it might be seen as less important. I tend to go with that - accompanying instruments are often panned left or right in my pieces but the melody often remains centre or something that is playing on its own is centred - perhaps i need to break out of this thinking though.

If you wanna try and recreate the positioning of an orchestra then yeah sure and maybe it could sound better but with VSTs etc. you have the opportunity to make things HYPER-REAL so panning can really be all over the place and that can be super effective but if you're trying to trick people into thinking it's real then i suppose follow that chart!

I don't think there are any hard an fast rules, just seeing what works. Sometimes it's really hard to listen objectively - someone with fresh ears might not notice how extreme you might think some panning is. I often have a really quite centre-focused stereo field which i wanna break free from but it's hard to make things not sound "weird"!

[Fishy]

There are basically no 'rules' for anything but orchestral layouts. Just copy what you hear if you like it.

Steely Dan/Donal Fagan do very hard panning for funky stuff. Most things are hard panned either left or right:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN9q-GQau8&feature=related

Muse have also done some unconventional rock stuff. Check this out, bass is panned right, guitar is panned left:

You can get away with some extreme stuff like above just but some people don't like it.

Pretty much the only rule is keep the main vocals, kick and snare central for pretty much everything. Although the beatles would disagree with me apparently. They've been known to pan vocals and even entire drumkits hard left right, not uncommon from early stereo records asyou'll hear:

TL;DR The Beatles did wtf they want, you can too!

[Rozovian]

A rule of thumb is to make things balanced. Pan something left, pan something similar right. I tend to use both shakers and hihat in my mixes, and can pan one left, one right without upsetting the balance in the track. If I only have one, I'll add a delay or something to the other channel if I need to pan it. Same with anything in any frequency range, except lows. I can pan a mid-range pad left and a mid-range arpeggio right. One lead slightly left, one slightly right.

Bass, kick, and snare tend to be centered, partly because low frequencies are difficult to distinguish the direction they come from so panning is mostly irrelevant, partly because they're usually central elements in the rhythm and makes things sound off-balance if panned, and partly because having the signal from two speakers instead of one means you get more sound out of it without having to have the louder channel louder (can cause clipping or compression issues).

Rhythm guitars, some pads, and other instrument that you want a wide sound for, and can't accomplish it using a wide reverb or something, can be doubletracked and hardpanned in opposite directions, tho this only works if the two tracks aren't identical. If they're identical, it's as if you have a mono track that's played in both stereo channels. If they're not identical, their differences will come from different directions, making the sound wide.

Some instruments tend to be recorded in stereo. When you sit by a piano, you'll hear the lower notes more from the left and the higher more from the right, because that's how the piano is built. Many virtual pianos mimic this. Other instruments might benefit from a separation like this, if they're solo or at least prominent instruments withou a lot of other stuff going on in the mix.

You can use panning to mimic how a stage would look like, but you probably won't get the mix as hard and big. This might work well if you're going for a jazz club sound, but not so much if you're going for a studio rock band.

Ultimately, panning is fun but not necessary. If you pan, don't pan too much, and try to balance it out with something in the same frequency range in the other direction.

[Moseph]

Even for orchestras, you'll want to play around with the panning a little bit depending on the effect you want. For example, while you could look at a seating chart and then spread the panning across the whole stereo field for a more studio-engineered feel, if you're going for what an audience member would hear in a concert hall, you'd want to squish everything more toward center. I recommend filling the entire stereo field and then using a stereo imaging plugin to finetune the stereo spread since it's obnoxious to continually have to individually re-pan 20+ instruments to get exactly what you want.

[Fishy]

Even for orchestras, you'll want to play around with the panning a little bit depending on the effect you want. For example, while you could look at a seating chart and then spread the panning across the whole stereo field for a more studio-engineered feel, if you're going for what an audience member would hear in a concert hall, you'd want to squish everything more toward center.

Bear in mind that everything *is* squished together by default from properly positioned speakers. Maximum 30 degrees left or right is pretty squished. Go as wide as you like, just make sure there isn't a gap in the middle.

Standard orchestral recording technique is the Decca Tree, and that sounds pretty damn wide on headphones, and it should! The 1st violins should have direct sound covering a fair portion of the left side, but should include some direct sound from hardest left.

[eilios]

It's important that however you pan anything(there's really no particular rule for anything besides orchestras and kick drums being centre, as people have said) you make sure to find a balance. If your left channel is 3x as loud as your right one there's a serious problem.

[dannthr]

Here's a fun orchestral seating chart for the kids based on time-period:

http://www.dsokids.com/visitthesymphony/seatingchart/default.aspx