Another subject, because why not.
I've come to the realization that I pan my mixes way too narrow. I've been watching some tutorials on panning. A lot of people do the left-center-right thing. That seems to work well for conventional music but it sounds like crap with dense synth music. There's so many similar textures, I find it really challenging as to where to put everything (exacerbated by the fact that I usually don't mix that wide). So I'm definitely using the entire stereo field now, and it's a big difference.
So, I started chatting with the awesome Martin Stuertzer again. This guy, in case you don't know:
I think he's a freakin' sonic wizard, in terms of the clarity and spatiality (is that a word?) of his mixes. So, I asked him if he'd do a tutorial, or at least send me some pointers. Figured some of you may find this helpful, if not necessarily new info:
I just recently thought a lot about panning, so it is funny that you ask now! I never gave it much thought but started to experiment a little bit. So far I came up with a few "rules":
- like in "normal" acoustic music the Bass stays in the center
- Parts that I layer from different sounds can be panned a lot. Some synths allow to pan osc1 and osc2 differently, I believe the Idirium can do this as well.
- Sequences can move through the stereo field, I use the Auto Pan in Ableton for it
As usual, I experiment a lot and do what sounds best to me.
You mentioned that you like my mixes (thank you!). Most benefit comes from the way I design my sounds. I try to program sounds in certain frequency ranges and take care that they don´t overlap too much. If two sounds play in the same frequency range I arrange them on the timeline so that they don´t play at the same time. In a track that I am recording right now I use two very heavy and deep bass sounds. They would kill the mix if they played at the same time so I put space between them.
