Panning techniques

[ChrisWParticipant]

Hi, I'm new to the Academy and just started mixing 'Crazy.' I was wondering if anyone had any tips on some alternative panning techniques. I listen to/play a lot of jazz and noticed its pretty common to pan instruments as they would be arranged in front of you on a stage. I was thinking of doing this with 'Crazy' but I'm not sure how to treat the stereo piano, if it should be 0-R100 or narrower etc. Any tips would be appreciated.

Here's some tunes I like with that kind of panning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHiwry1J6OU&list=PL0zZSXpTLOanwe1wz8dVmzMXabR_cM7D_&index=2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAMZS-kaMU

[Arthur LabusModerator]

Hi Chris,

i think it should be difficult to get that results with those tracks.
There is so much bleed ...

I personally only panned the guitar round 20% right and made "fake" stereo overheads.
So its more like this: https://youtu.be/jgytUKXsKJ4

[ChrisWParticipant]

Far, I was thinking some of the reverb could help mask it a bit but maybe not. That's an interesting take on 'stereo' on that track.

[Arthur LabusModerator]

I remember, while mixing this song, it was very difficult to even get the right volume on the tracks due all that bleed affecting the overall instruments and vocal volume.

But try to pan linke you wanted to - and see what heppens !

[James GormanParticipant]

My panning was (more or less, I'm on a different computer now):

guitar 55%L
vocals C, harmoniser+slap 100% LR (see below on what I did to the vocals first to make this work)
bass C
drums C, 20%W (I used the tom tracks for the width, no LPF on them, boost a touch of the air)
piano 40%R, 50%W

This was like you said to get a natural-ish sound stage L-R with the piano guitar and vocals spread out, but with a bit of a pop sensibility so the drums bass a vocals were still down the middle. I'd love to hear it if you can find the separation that you like and try an even jazz-ier panning scheme with everyone in their own place.

Two things I had to do to reduce the smear were:
- chop up the vocal track so I had all the parts with the singing, then all the parts without. Both got the same eq, but only the singing was compressed. Then blend in the other track. This kept the bleed low, but retained the vocal mic ambience.
- eq the bass something fierce. There is a tonne of guitar mud in the 200-800 range, if you don't get rid of that aggressively you'll find it hard to place the guitar, same with everything above 1.5-2K

Should add the link to my verison since it has the journey I took to get there (with help from Steve Taylor!) https://www.producelikeapro.com/forums/topic/crazy-james-gorman/

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by James Gorman.

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