How importent is panning to you

[Mindful]

To me the stereo feild is a hugley importent part of the piece of music im making.
I used to randomly place things around a hat pattern 3%left ,a clap 5%right ect but now I find it to be a very enjoyable and vital part of my music making.
It can free up space and give patterns a bit more life and intrest and playing with reverbs and delays can give more width and pressence to atmospheres ect.
I would love a stab at 5.1 but that isnt going to happen for me for a long time(due to cash and the fact that most of my stuffs not realy for home listening)

How do you use the stereo feild do you use it as a tool or as a creative part of your music(or both)
just intrested ;)

[acidsaturation]

Both I guess...

It's hard sometimes, 'cos yes it's good panning hats/snares/whatever a bit left or right, but can unbalance the tune if foe example you have a hat pattern that comes in a bit of the way in and it's one side and nothing comes in on the other side to balance it...

I do use panning delays and stufff quite a lot - like feed a hat pattern through a delay with left panned to three 8th notes and right panned to 5 or some such, or feed a pad or drone through a delay with an autopan on the delay so the delay drifts across the field.

Also do lots of stuff with incidental sweeps and stuff that start centred and then pan fast left then right with very few other sounds before kicking the track back in, or stuttered vocal samples that flutter between the sides.

Or double up a synth part with 2 slightly different sounds hard left and hard right...

[j_s]

the biggest problem i run into with panning is making sure everything sounds balanced, cos as has already been mentioned, if you've got chunks of the frequency spectrum missing from one of the stereo channels, things sound a bit off...

Though saying that, i have read on here before about people panning all the sounds from one 1/2 of the spectrum to one side and the other 1/2 to the other, making a sort of 2-way system out of a normal stereo setup. not something i think i'd do myself, but it's an intersting idea...

another thing that annoys me with stereo is that when you take things of centre they seem to lose some their punch & directness, so i often find myself leaving percussive/leading elements in the middle and building up atmospheres around the edges....

[Dave Elyzium]

i think panning is 99 percent best left for reverbs and delays etc..either that or carefuly engineer a nicely panned and seperated sequence and compress down to a loop to bring in and out so there are no gaps left in the stereo field before or after

[Ritzi Lee]

panning is the key of making room in your mix.

[audioinjection]

i usually dont pan much of my percussion, i try to keep that mainly in the middle, but when it comes to synths and stabs, i usually go pretty wide

[Mindful]

panning is the key of making room in your mix.

Word too big bird

[AcidTrash]

i usually dont pan much of my percussion, i try to keep that mainly in the middle, but when it comes to synths and stabs, i usually go pretty wide

Can you elaborate here?

[Mindful]

i usually dont pan much of my percussion, i try to keep that mainly in the middle, but when it comes to synths and stabs, i usually go pretty wide

Can you elaborate here?

I think hes basicly saying that he tries to keep his percussion as centered as possible(gives more power to your backbone)and gives the musical elements and atmosphere stuff a chance to breath freely.

[UngratefulNinja]

Well there's a double edged sword there with not panning some of your precussive elements.

I can understand not panning the bass, subs, kicks and snares because they're the main body of your sound. You want the centered, heavy, punchy and tight sound to your main elementsm, from the mids to the lows.

But the brighter (read: high) areas of your sound, the claps, hi-hats, cymbals and more elborate precussive elements (bongos, woodblock, cowbell, farty noise, whatever) might benefit from a wider stereo field. Keeps the drums interesting and makes the mix as a whole seem wider, and gives it more body. Don't go to nuts with the panning, but just a tick to the left or a tick to the right can make all the difference between a muddy, cluttered top end and a barrage of high end precussion that dances and gives precussive groove to your centered and punchy low end.

[Barely Human]

Panning is very important, but must be used with caution. If you are planning on making your percussion very wide, then this leaves little room for leads and other instruments that are phased very wide to breathe. I look at stereo width the same as i look at EQ. Everything works best when given its own place in the stereo field. I also use stereo phasinf when i have 2 sounds that use up the same freqs. By making one sound a bit wider, it stops it clashing and leaves both sounds clearly audiable. I usually do it this way -

Kick and bass - dead center
Mid percussion - Near center
High percussion - Some elements panned wide
Ride - Dead center
Main lead or hook - Wide as hell
*Little high pitched glitches and beeps - Fully panned from left to right

*I usually put high pitched little snaps, only a few milisecs long to add extra width to the mix. Even though most people wont notice them, it makes the mix seam a lot more natural and polished...

[BloodStar]

i think paning is important, and if used properly it can do nice spacey mix. i'm leaving lows in center and as i go to higher freqs, i'm making them more and more wide. then some leads which i want to standout, i pan them wide and sometimes i put some delay panned to opposite side, hope this make sense.. same with some crazy edits noise and such sounds. i do anything to make them sit well in the holes :lol:

[DeRael]

tis is probably all been mentioned above but I think it depends on what kind of sound your going for... when i'm not writing a tech track, where the percussion needs to blend together I use alot of percussive panning keeping sounds with the same rough f's around the same area in the stereo image.
But the again, if i am writing a tech track i tend to keep all my percussion more towards the centre to get that blending effect.