I often read on forums people giving advice to others to panning some of their sounds and parts to give more of a 'full' sound. I think i need to give my tracks a bigger and fuller presence so i'd like to give it a go. Are they any instruments that should be given more attention when i comes to panning? My tracks are a big more on the hard trance side i suppose...



Cheers in advance

You can use panning to create a wider stereo image, and this will make the track sound bigger. There are actually a lot of cool tricks that you can do.

However, there are no sort of rules on what instrument you have to pan and when. The only exception to that is to keep everything below approximately 300Hz in the middle, because the lower frequencies are the foundation of you track.

Read this article to learn some more about stereo image: [URL:http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan07/articles/pcmusician_0107.htm]Stereo Image Trickery With PC Plug-ins (Sound on Sound magazine)[/URL]

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Hey Benny,
For percussion I'd avoid panning too hard either way but by all means do use panning. Even if you use the same sample, lets say a hi-hat... you could switch between differently panned versions of the same sound to give some movement. Keep your kicks, claps and snares centered though.

For sound design purposes you can pan all the way... Alot of ppl duplicate an instrument, transpose one of them up an octave and pan them completely opposite eachother. This fills out the sound but you might want to lower the volume on the higher version so it isn't too noticeable.

The only rules I go by are:

1) Try to give equal time to the left and right - make sure the track isn't significantly heavier in one channel; and

2) Given the choice between panning apart two sounds in different registers (frequency ranges) apart, and panning apart two sounds in similar registers, I will try to do the latter unless I'm trying to create a specific effect.

Panning is a bit like EQ in that sense; you can use it to provide cleaner separation of similar sounds, but if you're sloppy and pan all similar sounds the same way, you'll create even more of an aural mush.

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