The mixer has his or her hands tied to what the arrangement gave them. One of my favorite sayings is that “good arranging is good mixing” – meaning that the song with the better arrangement (well thought out instrument choice, chord progressions, and linear flow) will always produce a better mix. This is critical to understand not just in the mixing phase, but in the recording phase as you build the song. Everything else is simply a shade of those three. Here’s why I’m pointing all of this out: no matter where you decide to pan things in your mix, at the end of the day there are really only 3 distinct holes you can fill. Who cares about the way things were “back in the day”?! Just a three way panning switch with Left, Middle, and Right.īig deal Graham. But it wasn’t always that way.Ĭheck out this old Universal Audio console. Now of course in the modern DAW and console we have a fluid pan pot that allows you to adjust the stereo placement even more precisely than those three positions. This gives us a phantom pan position called center. The third “middle position” is an auditory illusion where you have the same sound playing equally in the left and the right speaker. In reality there only two places: the left speaker and the right speaker. This is in fact how our speakers or headphones work. The left side, the right side, and up the middle.
When you think about it, a stereo recording or mix has only three spots to place your tracks. There Are Only 3 Main Spots In The Stereo Spectrum LCR panning (which stands for Left Center Right) is for some reason a hotly debated “method” of placing tracks in the stereo field. Although many of our favorite mixes are panned this way, people (including my friends) bristle at the thought.īut if you can get over the (non existent) reasons to hate on it, LCR panning can actually be a great hack for not just your mixes, but the recording stage. I love simple hacks that force me to get a better recording and mix.