Panning
Following the EQ and Aux sections of the channel strip is the panning knob (figure 11). If you have a stereo setup where you have two speakers, one receiving the left output and the other receiving the right output, the panning knob will move the sound of the instrument between these two speakers. When the panning knob is centered, it will send the same amount of signal to both speakers, but if you move the pan knob to the left or right, it will move the sound in the direction that you move the knob. This is very useful when building a mix as it helps create separation between the instruments, which allows the listener to hear what they need to hear.
Figure 11
3
As engineers, there are a few different tools that we use to build a clean mix and to differentiate instruments from each other. The three primary tools available on an analog console are EQ, Panning, and Balance. EQ, as we’ve already discussed, changes the timbre and tone of the instruments allowing them to work together sonically. Balance is how loud each instrument is in relation to the other instruments. Panning creates a stereo image of the inputs, allowing instruments to stand out based off of their location in the mix, left to right.
​
There are ways that panning can help you, but also ways that panning can hurt your sound. For example, your lead vocals should be panned center. If your panning is off and your lead vocal is panned hard left, their voice will only be coming out of the left speaker in your stereo field and won’t be coming out of the right speaker at all. If your room is large enough (and it doesn’t have to be too big for this to negatively impact it) half of the room will be hearing your lead vocalist and half of it will be hearing much less. So, as with anything else on the mixing console, you can get yourself into a bind. Similar to EQ, when panning, each instrument can be treated differently from each other. The following suggestions are gross generalizations that should allow you to get a good starting point on where to pan your instruments. This is where I start with my panning and I can set these even before the band arrives, knowing that it will get me close to where I want it. Again, most of these are generalizations and leave room for the engineer to move the instrument around in the sound field, similar to sweeping an EQ, to find the position that best works for their room.
Typically there are two ways to pan a drum set, what is known as “drummer’s perspective” or “audience perspective.” Drummer’s perspective is panned as if you were sitting at the drum kit. In a five-piece drum set (kick, snare, two rack toms, floor tom, hi hat, ride and crash cymbals) the kick and snare would be panned center, with the first rack tom (tom 1) panned slightly left (about -15%), the second rack tom (tom 2) panned slightly right (about 15%), and the floor tom panned a little further right than tom 2 (about 30%). The hi-hat would be panned further left than tom 1 (about -30 to -40%), and the overhead microphones are typically panned far left and far right if you have two, with the left microphone panned far left (-50%) and the right microphone panned far right (50%). This helps create a separation between all the instruments in the drum kit and gives them their own sonic space.
​
Following drums, bass is typically panned center. Lead vocals are always panned center as well. On occasion, I will pan BGV’s very slightly (5-10%) to the left or right. This leaves the worship leader occupying the only “center” space out of the vocals, usually allowing them to pop out of the mix just a little bit more. Keyboards are inherently stereo signals, but are panned all the way to the left and all the way to the right on the console. Electric guitars and acoustic guitars differ from situation to situation. If you have a vocalist who is also playing acoustic, and don’t have a full band performing alongside him, I suggest keeping the panning of both the vocalist and acoustic center. However, if there’s a full band with an electric guitar, or even when there are only two acoustics, I will sometimes pan each guitar in opposite directions (about 15-20% to either side) to help create clarity, fill in that space of the mix, and not get in the way of the other instruments (kick, snare, bass, lead vocals) that fill in the center of the stereo image. In the following video, I’ll do everything that we discussed here and show you how moving them in the stereo image can help the separation of the instruments. Hopefully this will help to clarify what we just talked about, as with the video on EQ.