The recording tricks thread (formerly: I love reversed audio)

[lincolnic]

Listen, I'm not saying everything has to be hard panned all the time. But an unfortunate trend I see pretty often from inexperienced mixers is a general fear of panning - not even hard panning, just moving things wider than 30% past the center. Taking advantage of the stereo field in both directions will make anyone's mixes less cluttered and claustrophobic. There's still plenty of room to play with even if you don't pan anything hard out!

Having said that, if you give me a band with two guitarists, my first instinct is going to be to pan them hard left and right. 

[alanp]

I'm not arguing that, at all. One of my best memories of audiophilia is of Dad proudly bringing home Michael W Smith's _Go West Young Man_ and telling me "Listen to this!" for the horse, galloping from one side of the room to the other.

I'm just saying that unrelenting hardpanning is tiring on the ears, is all. Everything in moderation.

[lincolnic]

I think maybe we're talking about two different things - it sounds like you mean pans that actively change over the course of a song, whereas I'm just talking about placing something in the stereo field and leaving it there.

I'm not a big fan of moving things around mid-song either. That always struck me as gimmicky.

[alanp]

Not quite -- my example of panning I love was of the sound of a horse galloping, slowly panning from hard left to mid to hard right.

Hard panning, OTOH, is when a sound is ONLY on left, or ONLY on right.

[lincolnic]

You don't have to explain hard panning to me, I make my living as a recording engineer. 

[midwayfair]

This week's super weird thing to do on a recording: Whisper the lyrics behind the lead vocal, and put it on an auto-panner.

Apparently this severely wigged out one of my friends. Which is good, because it's a pretty creepy song that I did it in.

[rullywowr]

This week's super weird thing to do on a recording: Whisper the lyrics behind the lead vocal, and put it on an auto-panner.

Apparently this severely wigged out one of my friends. Which is good, because it's a pretty creepy song that I did it in.

Kind of like Led Zeppelin - whole lotta love...with the pre delay "wayyyyy down inside, woman. Youuuuuuuuuu need it"

[midwayfair]

One of my favorite tools now is the stereo spreader in logic. It changes the stereo picture by frequency.

I found a particularly awesome use for it today: I recorded a mono guitar track, using just an E609, for a song I was doing vocals at the same time. With both centered, I ended up with a subtle, weird phasing issue that made the vocals a little quieter. So I used the stereo spreader to essentially move the guitar out of the way of everything centered around 1KHz. So the track sounds a little 'bigger' without scooping the mids or mucking things up with more instruments on a track that probably would have been impossible to overdub. Bonus: It sounds almost like it was multi-miced.

[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/jon-patton-3/beeswing-richard-thompson-cover[/soundcloud]