Multi Track Mix in Adobe Audition 3.0

Panning

Let’s be technical for a bit – and I’m going to use tech terms and jargon in this posting so be prepared if you’re new to the production game.  This post is for all you creative services directors, production directors – whatever it is you call yourselves in radio these days.  Me?  I prefer prod guy (or girl) or if I’m feeling particularly cocky: prod guru.  Yesterday I was working on a piece with a very high production value.  Lots of compression, reverb, EQ, various whooshes, stutters and gizmos.  You get the idea.  I decided to spice it up a bit more with some creative panning and that’s when I broke one of Hart’s rules:

Hart’s Rule #214

“Never pan a track more than 30% out of center”

I was playing with a plugin I’ve got that has some pretty neat panning effects and it sounded great in the studio.  Just awesome.  So I finished the piece up and ftp’d it on out into the ether.  On my way to pick up my son at daycare I decided to listen to it on my iphone because; boy I just really nailed that one.  Hmm, where’s that cool panning effect?  Yeah, couldn’t hear it at all.  I plugged the phone into the truck’s sound system.  Still couldn’t hear it.  That portion of the VO had vanished faster than  Bernie Madoff’s golf buddies.  That  reminds me of another of Hart’s rules:

Hart’s Rule #3

“Listen to your mixes outside of the studio”

But that’s a topic for another post.  Back to panning.  When you are playing with stereo effects in your mixes it’s generally a good idea to mix for mono compatible stereo.  Don’t pan a track more than 30% out of center.  Your vocal track or effect or whatever it is will stay nicely in the mix if you have to convert to mono at some point in the future.   And there are reasons you might.  If you happen to have an AM stick in your cluster you know what I’m talking about.  Sure some AM setups will handle a stereo file but what if the sum gets reversed somewhere?  Engineers do make mistakes occasionally despite what they may tell you. That beautiful commercial or promo you produced either sounds like crap or is unintelligible over the air.

Believe it or not a small percentage of your audience still listens to your FM in mono too so a mono compatible mix keeps them happy as well.  For that matter I know quite a few FM talkers that broadcast in FM mono to help out the signal footprint.

Mono files work best for phone systems and some internet applications too if you plan on playing the station or a set of promos through your phone system for example.  So it’s generally a good idea to keep your panning at a reasonable level.

Like most rules this one IS meant to be broken:  There’s a PSA about driving out right now where the VO only speaks in the right channel for a bit.  It’s cute, it’s clever and memorable, and it emphasizes the point of the PSA very well.

I’ve heard some killer imaging where the stereo field is wider than Kevin Smith’s butt.  And there are times when I too follow the sage words: Go Big or Go Home.  Just make sure you know the final destination of your mix and that it doesn’t need to be mono compatible for sure before you break that 30% threshold.

Now the savvy among you are saying, “But wait, Brian you played your mix in stereo devices so it shouldn’t have mattered.”  Right.  It shouldn’t have but it did. So I investigated today.  The new plugin I was playing with sounded great in the multi track mode but after I ran the mixdown through a multiband compressor with the brickwall limiter set it royally screwed it all up.  Yet another lesson – pay attention to how your plugins interact with each other.

So there you have it.  Hart’s rule #214

Agree?  Disagree?  Leave a comment below.

-Brian Hart is a prod guy guru and voiceover  actor.