quote:

Originally posted by Rodas I do know that some instruments / parts sound better centered than panned but I do notice that most mixes are compltely centered and don't pan anymore besides the usual bouncing? Do most of you pan all of your instruments or at least some? Is it pretty standard to pan most of your instruments left and right these days or mainly just to keep them centered?

Experiment!

Percussion is great panned, effects are great with panning, and certain instruments are great panned to give room for other instruments and create a sense of stereo width.

It's all up to you; in general, but this is no rule, your bassline and kick are not panned, and your lead might usually be centered, but that depends heavily on the track.

What he said ^. I also like to pan things that aren't bassy at all, like the lower bassy pad in a track I will always keep it dead center. I tend to keep the lead in the center and I don't pan the clap much but I guess whatever works.

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A chorus of phaser can also widen your mix. What they do basicaly is delay the sound one one side by a few milliseconds and let the delay vary along a LFO. This works very well for noisy basslines for instance.

FX shwoops sound nice when they pan from one side to the next. Especialy when they are noise and high pitched.

Often an accompanying lead is panned to one side to seperate it from the main lead.

Quite often a delay effect like double delay bounces the echoed sound from right to left and back. Giving a very groovy atmosphere.

Anyway, keep experimenting.

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Music is as universal to people as breathing. We've probably been at it since before we even started talking. Immaging two cavemen smashing away at a peace of flint to make a spearhead. It wouldn't take long for them to learn te synchronise the sound. And there you have it, the words first percussive band.

Music has survived wars, famines, the plague and many other things and has evolved with man across many cultures. Dance music is just the next step in the evolutionary chain. My guess is that it will probably be with us untill we are extinced.

Panning the percussive elements is always nice. It gives a little more headroom for all the other instruments that are dead center to "breathe." Like nhibberd said, a nice chorus/phaser is also nice because it moves the sounds around a lot and gives a great stereo effect. A bouncing delay going from side to side can also give this great stereo effect. Experiment and see what works for the track you are trying to create, but panning instruments definitely helps bring out separate sounds in a mix.

Tricky subject.. keep the most important elements in the middle like said before. In a club environment most systems are mono and a turntable has difficulties with low frequencies being stereo

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quote:

Originally posted by DeZmA In a club environment most systems are mono

Where, in Zimbabwe?!

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Music is as universal to people as breathing. We've probably been at it since before we even started talking. Immaging two cavemen smashing away at a peace of flint to make a spearhead. It wouldn't take long for them to learn te synchronise the sound. And there you have it, the words first percussive band.

Music has survived wars, famines, the plague and many other things and has evolved with man across many cultures. Dance music is just the next step in the evolutionary chain. My guess is that it will probably be with us untill we are extinced.

quote:

Originally posted by nhibberd A chorus of phaser can also widen your mix. What they do basicaly is delay the sound one one side by a few milliseconds and let the delay vary along a LFO. This works very well for noisy basslines for instance.

Traditional chorus and phaser work by altering the pitch of the left and right channel(with an lfo) so that they play a bit off tune and off time to each other. This might sound great if you have a stereo output, but if it gets output from a mono system it sounds like the whole shite is flanging like hell. Subtle use of this kind of chorus or phaser is advisable.

More modern chorus and phaser effects work by altering comb filters on the left and right channel(with an lfo) to create a similar effect, BUT it doesn't affect the mono-output at all which makes it great for widening tasks.

Also don't use widening on low freq material. It won't do it any good as you can't hear it and it will definetly sound bad on a club-PA. A mastering engineer will surely fix the mistakes with lowfreq phases but its better to do it right from the beginning.

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quote:

Originally posted by nhibberd Where, in Zimbabwe?!

Almost every soundsystem is mono atleast on the low-freq part..
And theres still many that are fully mono too. In Europe.

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quote:

Originally posted by Blue Surface Don't use panning from the channel, image your frequencies instead. Don't over use it though...

could you elaborate on that, please?

quote:

Originally posted by nhibberd FX shwoops sound nice when they pan from one side to the next. Especialy when they are noise and high pitched.

i left that out most of the time, thanks for reminding good tip!

quote:

Traditional chorus and phaser work by altering the pitch of the left and right channel(with an lfo) so that they play a bit off tune and off time to each other. This might sound great if you have a stereo output, but if it gets output from a mono system it sounds like the whole shite is flanging like hell. Subtle use of this kind of chorus or phaser is advisable.

Almost. All phase modulation effects like flangers, phasers, choruses are basically comb filters.

What is comb filtering? Comb filtering is caused when you copy a signal and add a very slight delay to the copied signal so that both do not play exactly at the same time (This is also called a stereo widener and it does indeed make the sound seem more spacious).

The extent of the delay changes the action of the comb filter. If the delay is very very short then its a phaser. If its slightly longer its a flanger. Longer still makes it a chorus. And when the delay is long enough that the human ear perceives the difference as two separate sounds it is basically a digital delay.

Playing 2 identical sounds where 1 is delayed slightly (less than 3 ms) results in certain frequencies at intervals being 180 degrees out of phase. And some being exactly in phase. This causes alternating destructive phasing and amplitude spikes where the two sounds are exactly in phase. If you were to look at a spectrum of the result, you would see the amplitude spikes as very tall peaks on the waveform and inbetween each spike where destructive phasing occurs, you would see a sharp valley where the frequency in that range at that time is destroyed. It is called a comb filter because it looks like the teeth of a comb.

The classic sweeping sound of a phaser/flanger is actually a resonant lowpass/highpass filter after the comb filter. Most phasers usually modulate it with an LFO for that sweeping sound. A chorus works in almost exactly the same way except the delay between signals is longer and the the resonant filter after the comb filter is usually high pass. The LFO modulating it is typically set to a very very fast speed. Much faster than that of a phaser or flanger's filter LFO which is slow enough that you can hear the oscillation.

Comb filters and their derivatives destroy mono compatibility because of the destructive phasing they create. So if you are playing a phasing sound on a mono output soundsystem, some parts of the sound will appear to suddenly disappear completely. In stereo its fine though.

Putting this type of effect on bass only instruments will cause the needle to jump into the next/previous groove on vinyl turntables. It does this because bass on vinyl is represented by a very long oscillation which is visible on the surface of the vinyl. You can read a vinyl and tell where the bass only sections are just by looking at the grooves and where they get really long and wavery. When phasing occurs on bass only, the long, slow groove disappears as most of that frequency at that interval is destroyed - thats what causes the annoying skips. It doesnt matter for treble instruments and mid range instruments because the grooves are much more tightly packed and the needle cannot just run out of the groove, even when large amounts of destructive phasing occur.

So if you ever make music that at some point is destined for vinyl, never use phase modulation effects on bass only instruments playing solo - like 808 kick drums and sub basslines. You will literally be running off a broken record.

Last edited by Derivative on May-25-2006 at 19:12

i see... i'll try to put that in practical use to see the difference. the multiband stereo imager which you mentioned, fl does not have that built in, is there any vst for that?