Why Are Most of My Panpots Centered?

[KB Gunn]

Interesting. I was in the dentist office recently and I told the receptionist that the music in the waiting room was playing only one channel of the stereo music source. She said they were using Spotify and had no control of the signal.

 

The reason I knew is because Eleanor Rigby was playing and all you could hear was the string quartet and the occasional vocal harmony parts. Paul's lead vocal was not heard because it was on it's own isolated channel. I noticed the same thing last year at Sam's Club with another Beatles song on their sound system. Ah, the old sixties recordings. With today's recordings, I would not have been aware of the lack of one of the stereo channels!!

[Folder]

Interesting. I was in the dentist office recently and I told the receptionist that the music in the waiting room was playing only one channel of the stereo music source. She said they were using Spotify and had no control of the signal.

 

The reason I knew is because Eleanor Rigby was playing and all you could hear was the string quartet and the occasional vocal harmony parts. Paul's lead vocal was not heard because it was on it's own isolated channel. I noticed the same thing last year at Sam's Club with another Beatles song on their sound system. Ah, the old sixties recordings. With today's recordings, I would not have been aware of the lack of one of the stereo channels!!

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Years ago I used to work at a company warehouse. Out on the loading dock they had a stereo with only one speaker blaring. Every time I would go out there I could tell that one channel was missing so I would go over and flip the little switch to mono. Day after day this went on. Every day I would flip the switch to mono and the next day somebody would have invariably switched it back to stereo.

 

Finally after several months of this back and forth switching a guy saw me switch it to mono. He came running over and said "Hey what are you doing? We like to hear it in stereo !!!"

 

I tried to explain to him that you can't hear it in stereo unless you have two speakers. I told him that there were two separate audio channels and that with only one speaker you were missing half of the sound. He looked at me kind of puzzled and I could tell that he didn't really understand what I was trying to explain to him.

 

The next day I went out on the loading dock and the switch was flipped back to stereo. I thought to heck with it. If they can't understand then just let 'em listen to one channel.

 

 

[Folder]

The reason I knew is because Eleanor Rigby was playing and all you could hear was the string quartet and the occasional vocal harmony parts. Paul's lead vocal was not heard because it was on it's own isolated channel. I noticed the same thing last year at Sam's Club with another Beatles song on their sound system. Ah, the old sixties recordings. With today's recordings, I would not have been aware of the lack of one of the stereo channels!!

 

When I listen to the radio I frequently hear songs where the channels are backwards. The left channel will be coming out of the right speaker and the right channel will be coming out of the left.

[trevcda]

When I listen to the radio I frequently hear songs where the channels are backwards. The left channel will be coming out of the right speaker and the right channel will be coming out of the left.

 

That drives me nuts! I seem to recall some of the early iPods would randomly reverse channels for some reason, which would send me troubleshooting through my PA trying to figure out where the wiring had been reversed.

[Folder]

 

That drives me nuts! I seem to recall some of the early iPods would randomly reverse channels for some reason, which would send me troubleshooting through my PA trying to figure out where the wiring had been reversed.

 

I can't figure out why it happens.

 

I used to think maybe they had the left and right wires crossed on their CD players but I assume everything is coming off of hard drives now.

The weird thing is one day I'll hear a song on the radio and the channels are backwards and the next day they are correct. Maybe I'm hearing them on different radio stations. I don't really pay attention to what station I'm listening to and I switch channels a lot but you would think it would be pretty easy to hook up a computer or CD player correctly. Or maybe there is something else going on in the way they are broadcasting the signal or something..

[blue2blue]

Re: KB's dentist office experience, I suspect they had a simple 1/8" TS input for the office announcement system and so were only getting one side. Or it wasn't plugged in properly or damaged or something. Obviously, the fact it was Spot is totally irrelevant. (Also, of course, also 'illegal' without licensing from the PRO's like ASCAP, BMI, etc, as the PRO bounty hunters [excuse me, field associates] will point out at annoying length.)

[blue2blue]

 

Years ago I used to work at a company warehouse. Out on the loading dock they had a stereo with only one speaker blaring. Every time I would go out there I could tell that one channel was missing so I would go over and flip the little switch to mono. Day after day this went on. Every day I would flip the switch to mono and the next day somebody would have invariably switched it back to stereo.

 

Finally after several months of this back and forth switching a guy saw me switch it to mono. He came running over and said "Hey what are you doing? We like to hear it in stereo !!!"

 

I tried to explain to him that you can't hear it in stereo unless you have two speakers. I told him that there were two separate audio channels and that with only one speaker you were missing half of the sound. He looked at me kind of puzzled and I could tell that he didn't really understand what I was trying to explain to him.

 

The next day I went out on the loading dock and the switch was flipped back to stereo. I thought to heck with it. If they can't understand then just let 'em listen to one channel.

 

 

Ameritone Paint Corporation, Compton, CA?

 

That's how the sound was on their loading dock. You could hear one channel on the loading dock and another over by the paint vats. At lunch, one or two guys would go sit halfway between.

 

 

 

Back in the 80s I used to listen to a college station from Claremont University some. Early one summer, I turned on the station and could barely hear anything. When all I could hear were some strings and some reverb return -- I realized what was happening.

 

Because of the weak signal (3KW) and distance (60 miles or so) I had to switch the tuner to mono to get anything like clean reception.

 

Apparently someone at the station had reversed polarity on one channel of the signal, so that when the channels were summed in my tuner (and likely many others), everything in the middle canceled out and only the out-of-phase and side stuff remained.

 

I called the station -- twice -- and tried to explain what was happening but whoever was in charge of the radio station during the summer was clearly utterly clueless.

 

It stayed that way until the first week of classes at the uni. That told me a lot about something.

[MikeRivers]

It used to be that buyng a stereo meant that you could put one speaker in the living room and the other in the bedroom.

[sailorman]

Preface my remarks by saying I'm a hobbiest and my work doesn't approach most of those that post here.

 

A few years ago I read an article by a well known engineer/producer (whom I won't name as I don't like to put words in other people's mouths). In one article, he stated "if everthing is recorded stereo, nothing is in stereo" and went on to explain that, since amp sims, keyboards, etc. each use their own algorithms to generate a stereo image, when you put them all together, there is no coherant stereo image (paraphrasing). This made sense to me, and I went back to several of my mixes, and bounced the stero tracks to mono. Panned instruments a bit left and right and put a reverb on just the output bus, which created just a single stereo image. I was surprised at how much more realistic and coherant my mixes sounded. I've pretty much used that technique ever since. Of course for something like a solo acoustic guitar or piano track, I'd still record in stereo, but then I don't use much if any reverb on such recordings. Of course this assumes that you're shooting for a realistic sound stage in the first place.

 

Can't take any credit for this approach, but I found the advice of that producer to be productive in my case.

[Lee Knight]

Why are your pan pots centered?

 

Fear of the spotlight. Fear of attention. Not you... but that rhythm guitar, or piano. They get insecure and crave a warm blankly. But I'm not sure it works, for me at least.

 

Balance is overrated and overused. In my humble opinion. I was watching some friends, very good players, gig a small room. It dawned on me... that live experience is panned mono. And it's GOOD.

With early reflections supplied by the floor, ceiling and nearby walls, the softening effect is gold, as are the reinforced directional cues.

 

Listening to Rubber Soul straight through while driving to LAX, that stereo is way unnatural and yet, George's guitar, John's brave skank and clank, they deserve to be paid attention to.

 

We spend so much time softening these cues, then struggle to regain them in unnatural ways... It does a great arrangement a disservice.

 

one man's opinion

 

p.s. Yes! Let's create hyper real, but it's much more effective in contrast to natural acoustic behavior.

[AlamoJoe]

Glad to see both you, and the profoundity of your opinions, Back!

[Anderton]

Balance is overrated and overused. In my humble opinion. I was watching some friends, very good players, gig a small room. It dawned on me... that live experience is panned mono. And it's GOOD.

With early reflections supplied by the floor, ceiling and nearby walls, the softening effect is gold, as are the reinforced directional cues.

 

One of my favorite "tricks" is to wrap mono sources with short, prime number delays...four at most, like 13, 17, 23, and 29 ms. They get panned in stereo to create the "room." If you do this to several mono sources, they sound stereo but in the same "room." For some reason this seems more realistic to me than slathering reverb on everything.

 

I will sometimes put reverb on the voice for the effect. I went through a dry spell for a while of not putting reverb on vox, preferring instead to double. But once I figured out what I'm calling my "HD vocals" technique, I de-emphasized doubling and went to adding reverb to a single voice.

 

Ultimately my yardstick is the sound of live performance. I do like to push the studio to its limits, but I'm always conscious of doing something that sounds like it could be created live (even if it took a dozen people, LOL).

 

I think Lee nailed it that stereo doesn't come from instruments, it comes from the environment. It made me realize that all my "stereoizing" is really about creating an environment. And that's why my panpots are centered

[nat whilk II]

It's interesting that, when pop material like Rubber Soul was mixed for new-fangled stereo, that the engineers did not have any concept like we have now of the stereo "sound stage". So you get those mixes that sound so bizarre now - all the vocals thrown on the right, drums and bass on the left, or some variation like that.

 

It's like they were thinking, "ok, we've got an extra speaker we have to run some of the sound through so the stereo enthusiasts will be gratified. What should we put on the extra speaker? I know! The vocals are the most important, so let's isolate them on the extra speaker. It's like 'vocalist' (points to the right speaker) and 'backup band' (points to the left speaker). Great idea, yes! That's the way we already look at our mixes anyway - vocals of prime importance, and the band backing up".

 

Over time, the idea of the sound stage we're all so familiar with got developed and refined. Vocals, kick, snare, bass in the middle. Guitars panned pretty far left and right. Find some in-between ground for the keys and whatnot - just don't crowd too much in the middle making it hard to maintain the vocals and the snare in the balance. Ok you can hard-pan the toms if you insist, but that's just a fashion people will tire of.

 

We've gotten so used to this basic sound stage that it's easy to think of it as realistic. But it's not, particularly - it's a convention. It does correspond to the way a band lays out visually across a stage, yes - but that's visual, not auditory. Ten rows back, it's all one big sound source. And up close, it's just skewed, not balanced in some even distribution by any stretch.

 

It's a good convention, no question there. But Mike's description of stereo as creating a 3D space is where stereo is "realistic" to an important degree.

 

Also - there's genre to consider. Electronic material - anything goes if it goes. Symphony orchestras - you want that big, unified, spacious sound with nothing sticking out and please, don't showcase any instrument with a hard pan - very bad taste indeed harrumph. Folk - most everything in the middle as befits the most democratic of genres, with fancy stuff panned to one side or the other, simple enough. Jazz - just listen to the players and forget about nerdy/geeky kid stuff like "stereo imaging" - totally beside the point.

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[WRGKMC]

Actually allot of that was because the pan pots weren't invented yet and all they had were hard left and right switches. It worked however which shows you how good their frequency mixing was.

[MikeRivers]

There were plenty of classical recordings coming out in stereo during the Beatles era, so they knew how to do it. It's just that the Beatles didn't play that way, so they couldn't be recorded that way.

 

Another thing that we got used to during the vinyl days after stereo records came out in about 1958 was that you had to pan low frequency material (in pop music, the bass and kick drum) to the center, Because of the way the cutter works, If it was too far off center, it would be difficult to cut without damaging the cutter head or making a groove that a playback stylus couldn't track.

 

And, just on on general principles, you'd pan the lead vocal and lead instruments to the center (so you could hear them on the speaker in the bedroom as well as the one in the living room ) With all that stuff in the center, the ear candy would get smothered if it wasn't panned well out to the sides.

[onelife]

Those old Beatles recordings were not meant to be released in stereo. They used the stereo recording systems as an early "multi track" which allowed them to record their instruments separately from the vocals.

 

Capital's stereo release of "Nowhere Man" is a great example because it starts a cappella so one channel has nothing on it until the instruments come in. The guitar solo is also overdubbed on the vocal track.

 

As the Beatles records were coming out, I chose to buy the stereo versions because, at the time, we thought stereo had to be better. I read somewhere that Geoff Emerick said they would spend three weeks on the mono mixes and there days on the stereo mixes.

 

When I bought the remastered albums I decided to get the mono versions and it has left me feeling that I missed out back in the sixties because I went stereo.

 

 

I just heard a couple of Beatles tracks on my iPod today and I noticed that the mono tracks seem to originate in the middle of my head when I am wearing phones whereas the stereo stuff seems to originate outside of my head.

 

 

.

[onelife]

It's interesting that, when pop material like Rubber Soul was mixed for new-fangled stereo, that the engineers did not have any concept like we have now of the stereo "sound stage". So you get those mixes that sound so bizarre now - all the vocals thrown on the right, drums and bass on the left, or some variation like that...

 

When Capital "stereoized" those recordings the multitracks were only two track so they simply separated the tracks on the disk. It wasn't until Sgt Pepper that they actually went for a stereo mix.

 

The White Album has some of those bizarre stereo moments you mentioned but I like it - maybe it's because, at this point, I'm used to it.

[Folder]

It's interesting that, when pop material like Rubber Soul was mixed for new-fangled stereo, that the engineers did not have any concept like we have now of the stereo "sound stage". So you get those mixes that sound so bizarre now - all the vocals thrown on the right, drums and bass on the left, or some variation like that.

 

It's like they were thinking, "ok, we've got an extra speaker we have to run some of the sound through so the stereo enthusiasts will be gratified. What should we put on the extra speaker? I know! The vocals are the most important, so let's isolate them on the extra speaker. It's like 'vocalist' (points to the right speaker) and 'backup band' (points to the left speaker). Great idea, yes! That's the way we already look at our mixes anyway - vocals of prime importance, and the band backing up".

 

Over time, the idea of the sound stage we're all so familiar with got developed and refined. Vocals, kick, snare, bass in the middle. Guitars panned pretty far left and right. Find some in-between ground for the keys and whatnot - just don't crowd too much in the middle making it hard to maintain the vocals and the snare in the balance. Ok you can hard-pan the toms if you insist, but that's just a fashion people will tire of.

 

We've gotten so used to this basic sound stage that it's easy to think of it as realistic. But it's not, particularly - it's a convention. It does correspond to the way a band lays out visually across a stage, yes - but that's visual, not auditory. Ten rows back, it's all one big sound source. And up close, it's just skewed, not balanced in some even distribution by any stretch.

 

 

 

Actually Rubber Soul was remixed in the 80's by George Martin. Also the Yellow Submarine Soundtrack which was remixed and released in 1999 have the best Beatles mixes IMHO.

 

I don't think the "Vocals, kick, snare, bass in the middle. Guitars panned pretty far left and right. Find some in-between ground for the keys and whatnot" became the standard because it was trying to mimic a sound stage so much as I think that's what people eventually thought sounded best and most practical. When only one channel has your low frequency stuff the music can sound unbalanced because bass frequencies tend to be non directional in nature. Higher frequency stuff is more directional when panned across the stereo sound stage and they ad color. The kick and the snare drive the rhythm and give the music it's feel while the vocals provide the main melodic focus.

[nat whilk II]

 

When Capital "stereoized" those recordings the multitracks were only two track so they simply separated the tracks on the disk. It wasn't until Sgt Pepper that they actually went for a stereo mix.

 

The White Album has some of those bizarre stereo moments you mentioned but I like it - maybe it's because, at this point, I'm used to it.

 

All I know is what I've read, and I'm no Beatles scholar that's for sure, but in my copy of Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (compiled for the most part straight from entries in the Abbey Road logs) it was 10/17/1963 when they first recorded with a 4-track machine, working on "I Want To Hold Your Hand", "You Really Got A Hold On Me", "This Boy", and the 1963 Christmas Record for the Fan Club.

 

Not trying to nitpick here...but this is way before Sgt. Pepper. Their 2nd British album release was November '63, Sgt. Pepper being their eighth. But details of their convoluted recording history aside, my only point is that the development of the sound stage concept took time - the fact that it was not the obvious thing to do once the capability was there, I take as evidence of the artificiality of a convention often referred to as realistic, but which I think is not particularly realistic.

 

Mike says the classical recordings were different and he knows a lot about that and I know nothing about that at all, so I'll defer on that front.

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

 

 

 

 

[nat whilk II]

 

Actually Rubber Soul was remixed in the 80's by George Martin. Also the Yellow Submarine Soundtrack which was remixed and released in 1999 have the best Beatles mixes IMHO.

 

I don't think the "Vocals, kick, snare, bass in the middle. Guitars panned pretty far left and right. Find some in-between ground for the keys and whatnot" became the standard because it was trying to mimic a sound stage so much as I think that's what people eventually thought sounded best and most practical. When only one channel has your low frequency stuff the music can sound unbalanced because bass frequencies tend to be non directional in nature. Higher frequency stuff is more directional when panned across the stereo sound stage and they ad color. The kick and the snare drive the rhythm and give the music it's feel while the vocals provide the main melodic focus.

 

I totally agree it's a good convention for good reasons. But like all conventions, it has limits and it becomes a repeated standard way of doing things in an unexamined fashion over time. I personally found myself mixing in the standard way all the time, and some revisiting of mono recordings and introducing some Auratone-type monitoring has shaken me out of the convention to some extent. Nothing earth-shattering, no, but for me, it's adjusted my concept of how to put stereo to better use in my own mixes.

 

nat whilk ii