L-C-R Mixing

[Jind]

I found this thread over at the Sonar forums:

L-C-R Mixing in Sonar

Which lead me to the original article cited:

Principles of Multitrack Mixing: The Phantom Image

I found this to be a very interesting read if the time is taken to read it all the way through.

There is also another discussion of this at:

http://thewombforums.com/showthread.php?t=10454

 

[Jind]

Just as a side note - the site this article came from has lots of real interesting reads: http://www.moultonlabs.com/

Some are very old but still true articles while others are new and interesting as well.

 

[greyskull]

not a sonar user, but im a fan.
tend to pan things pretty wide. use the inbetweens to fit in little things.

 

[Jind]

not a sonar user, but im a fan.
tend to pan things pretty wide. use the inbetweens to fit in little things.

Sorry if I implied that this was a Sonar issue - it's simply where I originally found the link to the article.

 

[Fox Mulder]

I can't view the link for some shit-ass reason.

Is this about MS processing?

 

[AudioGeekZine]

this is about panning all your tracks to only 3 positions instead of 200 possible positions, Left, Center, Right.

 

[vespiz]

I mixed a whole album recently with only L-C-R, except toms were panned with regards to what was happening in the overheads. Worked great and now I've found myself mixing more and more like this, or at least taking this as a rough starting point.

 

[Erkan]

Haven't read any of the links yet but what is the technical advantage of only panning to 3 fixed positions instead of using all the inbetweens?

 

[DanLights]

Haven't read any of the links yet but what is the technical advantage of only panning to 3 fixed positions instead of using all the inbetweens?

same here

 

[AudioGeekZine]

you don't spend any time panning to arbitrary positions that make no difference in the big picture.

carefully pan to those in between positions, take your mix somewhere else where the speakers are closer or farther apart, Totally different.


The very old consoles didn't have pan pots, just switches to select the output bus (1, 2, both).

 

[ze kink]

I do this all the time too. I've always liked how it sounds. I just recently checked out some of my old recordings, and even the first ones are mostly panned like this.

 

[DaveBlack]

So essentially, what the article is saying is that the only effective panning is hard left, center, and hard right and anything in between can be achieved through various millisecond delays?? cuz that's what i'm getting from it. I dont disagree with it and I'll def experiment with this method but I've panned toms plenty of times only a little in and I've noticed the seperation. Maybe I'm misreading the article, i dont know...

 

[Metaltastic]

I mixed a whole album recently with only L-C-R, except toms were panned with regards to what was happening in the overheads. Worked great and now I've found myself mixing more and more like this, or at least taking this as a rough starting point.

I think this is really important to specify - Jon (AGZ), you make a good point about subtle panning decisions not sounding the same when you go to another setup, but when you've recorded a multitude of instruments with some form of stereo mic setup (where the positions of the instruments in the stereo field has already been determined), IMO it's really important to match the panning of the spot-mics for said instruments to their position in the stereo field. Also, I find the vocals clear up if I pan a simultaneous lead a little to the left or right, but hard-panning it would just be distracting since it would only be coming from one side. No, in conclusion, this LCR thing doesn't really make much sense to me!

 

[Metaltastic]

you don't spend any time panning to arbitrary positions that make no difference in the big picture.

carefully pan to those in between positions, take your mix somewhere else where the speakers are closer or farther apart, Totally different.

Totally different? I'm not sure of that, cuz they're all still similar in panning in relation to one another, which is key IMO, cuz I usually pan to try to give instruments their own space as much as possible, and if the only advantage to LCR mixing is saving time, then I'll pass, cuz it really doesn't take me all that long!

 

[DanLights]

at'em boy!

 

[AudioGeekZine]

Totally different? I'm not sure of that, cuz they're all still similar in panning in relation to one another, which is key IMO, cuz I usually pan to try to give instruments their own space as much as possible, and if the only advantage to LCR mixing is saving time, then I'll pass, cuz it really doesn't take me all that long!

the advantage is clearer, less cluttered mixes, in less time.

If you are into panning wherever the fuck, try doing it in Mono

 

[Metaltastic]

How are they clearer and less cluttered if things are more spread out though? Not trying to get confrontational or anything, just debating - and actually, panning in (summed-to) mono is what usually makes me settle on the more specific pan choices as opposed to LCR! (especially with a classical recording I did that I've been mixing)

 

[AudioGeekZine]

They just are!

dude just try it, take a standard rock song. Pan everything hard left, center or right, put toms wherever depending on how many. Get your levels right. print it like that
Now pan all the guitars and shit how you usually do it and print that.

Compare

If it doesn't work for you that's fine.

 

[Jind]

I've been spending the past few days reading over the many, many articles available on the source site http://www.moultonlabs.com/ and I'm really impressed with the quality of information for a free site. Dave Moulton has a vary interesting background having gone from Juilliard School of Music, to engineer/producer, he also was the Chair of Music Production and Engineering at the Berklee, and many other things. He now is the principal in a firm specializing in wide-dispersion loudspeaker systems. You can read about him here: http://www.davemoulton.com/profile.html - it's a very interesting and varied background indeed.

 

[Jind]

One of the interesting statements made in one of the threads linked is from someone who was asked to research audio related popular literature and the fact that the majority of what we know comes from ad copy from companies with vested interest in selling a product - not necessarily scientifically backed.

I took a music psychology course at Michigan State during the '60s. The very first thing our teacher did was to make us find and study every footnote cited in the popular literature. We soon learned that virtually everything that originated somewhere other than Bell Labs, RCA or the BBC was fictional ad copy that had been written to promote some product. It was really quite stunning to realize how much pure BS has been written, endlessly repeated and, unfortunately, believed to be factual about audio.

This is why there are endless "objective/subjective" arguments about what we can or can't hear. We've all heard plenty that simply didn't match up with what we've read. There's actually a very good reason for this!

I would imagine that if that same research was performed today that the BS level would be even higher given the internet and what essentially adds up to opinion with little to show proof/research backing it up. After reading that quote I did some thinking about some of the things that I know about audio and how I gained that knowledge - I realized that some of the things that I do simply come from what I've read, with little effort given to really understand how it works. If I want to know how to do something I simply look for the solution and try it with very little experimentation on my part - I sort of just take it as gospel if it works, probably a bad habit on my part. Lately however I've taken a greater interest in understanding audio and doing much more self experimentation to learn this art ot a greater degree. Now, I like reading information that has the research to back it up - I'm finding a lot of what Dave Moulton writes on his site is in this format.

At a bare minimum it is interesting reading if you want a more scientific view of audio instead of opinion/ad copy.