Panning Part 2
Tips and Tricks
1. What belongs in the centre?
Firstly, you might know that our ears have limited capabilities to determine the direction of low frequencies. That’s why it doesn’t really matter if you don’t place the sub speaker in the centre of your listening environment.
Secondly, bass frequencies have most of the energy in our mixes so it makes sense to place those in the middle of your mix that the speakers can share the energy load.
If you do have to pan bassy instruments or tracks out of centre for artistic reasons, try to find a way to split the signal into 2 frequency bands. You can do this by copying to two audio tracks and utilizing two different filters, a high cut and a low cut with the same turnover frequency and slope. The low pass signal will stay centred and the high pass will be panned as desired. A good turnover frequency range would be around 120 – 150 Hz. This method keeps the majority of the sound energy in the centre and still displays a stereo panorama on the selected audio tracks.
There are also a few plug-ins around you can use to do exactly that.
Izotope’s Ozone and Optium FX’s BassLane (freeware) are just two you can try.
2. Narrowing can help
Sometimes a too wide stereo image of your drums or piano track can sound unnatural and might not suit every kind of music. It can be really distracting so try to narrow the stereo width once in a while and trust your ears.
3. Inverted frequencies
I mentioned in the introduction that sounds arriving from a certain direction have a different frequency response in each ear. You could simulate that effect by creating a mirror image of a track and boost the presence region a few dB. On the copy of that track you choose the same centre frequency and Q value but attenuate that frequency range by the same amount of dB. This can be done in conjunction with panning if desired.
This trick also has the advantage that if you sum to a mono signal, the sound doesn’t suffer.
4. Delay for direction
To simulate the inter-aural-time-difference described in the introduction, you simply send the same signal to the left and right speaker and apply a short delay on one of the channels, around a millisecond or so. You could even further emphasize the effect by slight level panning- but be aware that this trick can introduce phasing when summed to mono, which compromises the sound on an old radio or mono TV.
5. Keep it in balance
Have an evenly spread balance in energy within your mix. No lopsided mixes please.
6. Reverb and direction
A mono signal effected by a reverb creates a stereo information if the return is in stereo. If you want to maintain the direction of the mono track without the reverb masking the position in the stereo panorama, try inserting a mono reverb and pan to the desired location in the mix.
Continues in advanced panning in Part 3
Panning Part 1
Introduction
To fully understand all the options and possibilities there are to create a stereo panorama within our mixes, we firstly have to grasp how our ears determine the direction of a sound source. People tend to associate a level difference on the 2 channels which stereo is made of, but that is just one aspect to achieve a stereo image in our mixes. There are 3 major methods our ears and brain use to determine the direction of a sound source, which are…
Perception through our ears:
Inter-Aural-Time-Difference:
Time arrival difference between left and right ear
Sound reaches one ear first before the other
Inter-Aural-Amplitude-Difference:
Difference in loudness/volume between our ears
Sound appears louder in one ear than the other
Effect of the Pinna (outer part of the ear):
The arrival difference between our ear canal and sound bouncing off the pinna and entering our ear
Time will vary depending on sound source
These are the major clues for our ears to determine direction. Additionally.
The frequency response of our ears changes depending on what angle the sound is coming from – this is one of the ways we can tell whether a sound comes from in front or from behind us.
Based on this theory, there is a lot we can do to simulate this sensation.
More about panning will continue in Part 2….
