Panning audio
The simplest tool to increase stereo width is a technique called panning. Before we can explain panning, we need to understand what mono and stereo mean.
Monophonic sound (known as mono) is the term used when different audio channels play the same sound equally. Regardless of whether you are listening out of your right or left speaker/headphone, the audio is identical. Mono is used for radio talk shows and telephone calls.
When identical audio is played out of two audio speakers, as with mono, your ears perceive the sound as originating from a location in the middle of the two sources. This is known as a phantom center.
Stereophonic sound (known as stereo) means you have different sounds coming out of each audio channel. If your left speaker/headphone has a different sound coming out of it from the right, your sound is said to be in stereo. The benefit of stereo sounds is that it creates the illusion of audio coming from multiple directions just like in real life. If you were to watch a band playing live, the instruments are positioned on the stage at different locations. The audio reaches each ear at different intensities depending on how close each instrument is. Stereo sound is used in films and music players.
Panning means choosing the direction in which sound comes out of audio channels. We can set audio to pan left, meaning that the audio comes out of our left channel, or pan right so the audio comes out of our right channel. In film score mixing, you may have additional pan controls to include up and down as well, but this requires a special speaker setup such as in a movie theater, with speakers surrounding the listener above and below them, as well as to the left and right.
By default, audio coming out of any channel in the mixer is set to monophonic. If you were to have two identical sounds where one is panned all the way right and one is panned all the way left, you would hear a mono sound. Duplicating a track and hard panning each in opposite directions do not make a sound stereo. In order to hear a stereo sound, you need to have different sounds playing out of the left and the right audio channels.
Let’s pan some audio:
- Load any instrument and add some notes to it. Route the instrument to a channel in the mixer.
- While playing your audio, left-click on the panning control knob and drag it left or right. As you drag, you’ll be able to hear the audio volume if you focus on the speaker you’re panning toward:
Figure 7.1 – Panned audio
You can pan any sound in the mixer in a similar fashion.
Panning best practices
Low-frequency sounds instinctively are associated with larger instruments. Biologically, this makes sense, as a lion makes a much deeper and larger sound than a bird, which makes a high-frequency and smaller sound. You usually want your low-frequency sounds (sub-bass and bass) to be centered in your mix, meaning we want them to be mono. Why? Human ears struggle to distinguish the direction of subfrequencies. It feels as though subfrequencies just exist all around you regardless of where they come from. Further, if you have differences between the left and right channels of your bass, you might accidentally create phase cancellation when playing your subfrequencies on live speakers.
Your higher-frequency sounds can be panned out more to the left or right. If you have an instrument panned to the right, you should have another instrument panned to the left to balance out the mix. You want to avoid scenarios where you have an instrument hard-panned to one side for long durations of time and nothing panned to the other side. This will result in the mix feeling off-center and sounding unpleasant to users wearing headphones.
If you have two similar sounds occupying the same frequency range playing simultaneously, consider panning the instruments in different directions to spread them out. This can result in sounding like the instruments are playing off each other and add a sense of distinction between them.
Lead vocals should be centered in your mix (mono). Backup vocals and harmonies can be panned and spread out in the mix.
Panning in combination with other stereo-width tools can create interesting effects. For example, using automation to pan a guitar to the right while gradually panning a delay of the guitar to the left can make it appear like the guitar sound is bouncing off a wall and echoing into the opposite ear.
Panning is the simplest tool to use to create stereo width. Next, let’s look at a technique called reverb.
