One of the keys to having a good mix is the position of all your instruments. If you look at your soundstage of where all the sounds are coming from, you will have a richer mix. Not only that, but you can make it sound bigger and clearer sounding mix. In searching for the best way to position my instruments in Live I learned a lot about how Live Pans things and other techniques.
Panning is achieved by changing the level of one stereo channel in relation to the other channel. That is a very simple way to make something sound more to the right or left. This doesn’t truly represent what we as humans hear, but it is the easiest and cleanest way to do it. This is why Ableton Live has a Pan Pot, or the Pan function, on each track and master.
How does it work:
If the pan is centered you then the input signal is passed through unchanged. Each channel is amplified by 0dB. If you pan completely to one side you want the other channel to be off. How live does this, is it lowers the volume equally as it raises the other sides volume. That way when you are 50% of the Left then its volume increases by 50% and it lowers the Rights volume in half. It Increases the volume of the left to compensate for the energy lost in the missing channel’s volume.
How this Affects Your Mix:
Let’s say you have a bongo recording that you used two mics for. One on The larger ongoing and one on the smaller size bongs. Now if in live you had this as a stereo track while mixing and you started to pan to the left you are not just moving both the large and small bongo sounds to the left equally. What you are doing is lowering the volume of the small one and raising the large one. This way you are losing the feeling that the whole instrument is to the left, but instead that the left mic was louder. This will change the sounds of your final mix and might not be the realistic sound stage you were looking for.
Other things to Keep In Mind
- Panning only changes volumes, never the sound itself.
- In Live, the boost at the extremes is + 3dB, so you might need to lower the volume after panning.
- The way the utility works is the same as the track panning, so it will act the same unless you use it in combination with stereo width.
Alternative to the Pan Pot
There are quite a few tools out there to help give you more control of panning. One of these tools is Flux, a free vst, and I highly suggest it. Over the last few years I developed my own tools to help get the psycho acoustic panning. I want to be able to control the panning to make the whole signal move left and right in a way that makes more sense to me and creates cleaner mixes.
The first tool you should look at for better panning is the Utility. It can let you select different Channel Modes chooser allows selective processing of the left and right channels of a sample. If, for example, Left is selected, the right channel is ignored and the left channel appears on both outputs. This is useful to separate stereo files into the Left and Right.
Then you have the Panorama chooser pans the signal anywhere in the stereo field. This is the same as the Pan Pots in each track. But if you use it with the Width Control you get a whole new level of control.
The Width control acts as a continuous mono to stereo controller when set from 0 to 100 percent. Beyond 100% it widens the sound. We won’t get into the widening techniques, but let’s talk about the 0-100. So now if you take a stereo sound of those bongos and change the width to 50%, then the sound is 50% mono. Meaning that both sounds are spread more evenly in the left and Right. That way you narrow the field and can then pan it. This makes it much more like panning the whole instrument as compared to just changing the mic levels.
I personally have taken this a step further with my own custom tools. One of these tools is the (aq) Spacial Scalpel. This Audio Effect Rack is a more advanced way of using Utility to split it into the Left and Right Signal. That way you can lower the Left and Right volume, change the depth of what Left and Right is, as well as add a delay to the Left or right to give it more of a psychoacoustic effect.
I use this tool as I go to in mixing and moving the sounds exactly how I want. Below is a video that walks through how I use this and the Advantage to the effect rack.
This Audio Effect Rack is just one of my tools found in the (aq) Mixing Tool Kit. The kit has a Massive Collection of two. leas’ for mixing including a binaural banner, mid side controls, and more. (aq) Mixing Tool Kit at the store to level up your mixing and have complete spatial control as well as other unique tools to level up your production.
Ending Thoughts:
So next time you are working on separating your instruments remember what exactly panning is doing and how you can use it to move things in your sound stage to get a full mix. Ableton panning is great, but by trying the utility and other effects you might get lot tighter of a mix. The nice thing about having a good stereo channel is it will add some much more depth in your mix.
Hopefully this gives you a new perspective on the sound stage. If you got techniques you like please share them in the comments below. The video at the end shows off the Mixdown Toolset and all the different racks and tools found in it.
