LiveFromKyoto
Member
Fusebox said:Make PANNING your friend. If you put any part on 0 pan or full pan you want to have a good reason for it. Drums and bass can hang around the centre, you can throw cymbals and pads out wide, and if you want to really throw a sound over your shoulder and to the side then you can put it out of phase. But for the start, it's all about the panning. Use your ears for it, play your song, grab the pan knob for a single part, close your eyes and start panning the part around, you'll notice some places its dead, but some places it leaps out of the speakers. A lot of the pros actually listen to their mix in mono while they pan a sound around. When the sound being panned pops out of mono mix you know it'll pop out of your stereo mixdown.
Yeah, I've got that far - there's actually a good deal of panning going on in my stuff. If you listen to Lost in the rain, the main guitar part is continually panning back and forth. There's a synthesizer bit which spends one section towards the left, one transitioning, one on the right, and so on, generally the opposite of where the guitar part is at. The piano is on the right the whole time. The drums are using an expander module to come out of far L/R and leave the middle open.
I may just need to dial everything back a bit - in terms of volume and reverb - but then getting it to come out at a decent volume in the end becomes the challenge. There's also the continuing problem that a lot of instruments lack a certain amount of character and oomph if they're below a certain threshold.