Effect Series: How to use Pan
For this post, we’ve created a project that you can work on while going through the instructions. Click here to open it up in the studio.
You might have heard of panning. It’s very useful to be aware of because, with just a few tricks, your mix can turn into something completely different. Basically, your mix contains the directions middle, left and right. These directions make up the space in your room - the room that your song fits in.
When you decorate a room, you don’t want to put all the furniture in one spot. Instead, you might want the sofa to be in the corner, the carpet to be on the floor, the lamp to be in the ceiling and so on. Like the furniture in a room, we don’t want to put all our tracks in one spot. We have a whole room to use for our tracks, so let’s make sure to use it!
Open up the project here, and for this step, play tracks 1-4 as you’re going through the following steps. We’ll get to the other tracks in the following weeks.
In this project, both the melody and the keys are in the middle of our room - or in the middle of the stereo width. The melody should be in the middle, because we want that to be the center of attention, so we’d like to move the keys. Adjust the Pan on ‘Track 2 - Keys’ to just below 11 o’clock. Now the keys are on the left side and won’t collide with the melody.
Do you have any questions on this? Reply with a comment and our Audio Producer will explain further!
As we mentioned earlier, the Pan effect lets us decorate the room for our song. We can put different sounds and instruments in different locations within the room - or the stereo width as it is called. In this section, we’ll turn away from the Pan effect and look into the 3D effect. This control allows us to place our sounds within the room with more precision.
Open up the project here, and for this step, play tracks 1-6 as you’re following the instructions. We’ll get to the other tracks in the next section.
With Pan, we can place sounds to the left or to the right in our room - and this goes a very long way - but what do we do if we want to place sounds in the front or in the back? This is where the 3D effect comes in.
Apply 3D on ‘Track 5 - Percussion’. Start off by rotating the control and listen as the sound of the congas change. Pretty cool, right? Then turn the control to about 5 o’clock. In this position, the percussion won’t collide with anything else in the mix, and this will make our stereo width sound a lot neater!
Do you have any questions on this? Reply with a comment and our Audio Producer will explain further!
Now we’re going into one of the most common cases of panning - vocal panning. In modern productions you’ll find vocals everywhere, panned in different directions to make songs sound wide and warm. Producers often record the same phrases from vocalists many times, to be able to put each recording in different places in the stereo width - and it’ll come as no surprise that we've done the same thing here!
Open up the project here, and for this step, play tracks 1-10 as you’re going through the following steps.
On track 7-10 we have a bunch of vocals. If you solo them, you’ll hear that there are two pairs of vocals, one low pair and one high pair. Start by adjusting the Pan on ‘Track 7’ all the way to 7 o’clock, and ‘Track 8’ all the way to the opposite direction, to 5 o’clock. Now, the high pair is really wide, and adds a depth to the production.
After this, we still have two tracks left that need some panning. We want to spread out the low pair as well, but to avoid collision with the high pair, we’ll use different positions for our Pan knobs. Adjust the Pan on ‘Track 9’ to 10 o’clock, and the Pan on ‘Track 10’ to 2 o’clock. Now, we have a package of backing vocals that gives depth and space to the production!
Comment below if you have any questions and our Audio Producer will reply!
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Hi Rule 15, and thanks for responding!
As a rule of thumb, I suggest placing the vocals, bass, hi-hat and snare in the center. Start with those elements, and find a nice mix in volume between them. Then, you can decorate the stereo image with the other instrument - i. e., start panning. Always listen to how the vocals sound in the mix, as you start adding more and more elements.Panning can make your different sounds clearer, as they will have a dedicated spot in the stereo image - however, you might also have to apply EQ's to your different tracks to make them sound more distinct. A rule of thumb here is to remove low frequencies from the sound - if your mix is daft and lack clarity, it is often a consequence of too much low to low-mid frequencies.
Keep exploring and remember to trust your ears!
/Andreas Pejler, Audio Producer at Soundtrap
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