Micropan for greater track separation - Pro Tools Tutorial

- [Instructor] Some of the best mixers in the world spend hours on their panning, just moving things left and right a little at a time, until things jump out of the mix. By looking at your panning a lot harder, you'll find yourself getting the same effect without having to EQ as much. So first of all, let's listen to this track, and everything is either in mono, or, if it's a stereo track, it's spread out in stereo. Now, look especially here, we have the snare in stereo, we have a hi-hat in stereo, shaker in stereo, snaps in stereo. ("Happy Birthday" by Patricia Bahia) Now, it sounds pretty good. The only thing is it's sort of boring, because everything is up the middle, or it seems like it's up the middle. Everything that's in stereo, panned in stereo, is far left and right, so it really makes for a boring mix. And not only that, there are some instruments that are covered up by other instruments. They sound okay when they play alone, but as soon as another instrument comes in, it covers it up. So we can solve all that with panning, and here's what we're going to do first. We're just going to listen to the percussion here, so we'll listen to the snares first. Hi-hat, shaker, snaps. (rhythmic drumming) We may very well want the snare to be in stereo. There's one track right here. This is in stereo, and in fact, this sounds pretty good and it's pretty wide. And since we kind of want it in the mix and there's not a lot holding the mix down, we may want to keep this in wide stereo. Let's just listen to it by itself. (rhythmic drumming) That's a pretty good combination, but let's listen to shakers, snaps, and hi-hat. Let's see how we can help that. (rhythmic drumming) Here's where the micropanning comes in. What I'm going to do is, I'm still going to keep it in stereo, I'm not going to make it as wide, though, and I'm going to put it out to the right. Now listen to it. (rhythmic drumming) Listen to it just by itself. (rhythmic drumming) Now we're onto the snaps. What we're going to do is pan the snaps just the opposite, and once again, the snaps are pretty wide, so what I'm going to do is, I just want a sliver of the stereo spectrum, just a sliver dedicated to it. But again, since this is in stereo, I'm going to try to keep some width as well, and you can see micropanning here. Here we go. (rhythmic drumming) Now, again, with the hat, let me do the same thing. We're going to pan it to the right. Actually, I think I like this better. If I go shaker to the left, and the hi-hat to the right makes a little more sense. And the snaps, we'll keep on the same side as the hat. Put it like this. Once again, take notice, there's not a whole lot of stereo spectrum that we're taking up. But it's just enough to make it interesting and to carve out a little space for each instrument. (rhythmic drumming) See, it's a lot more interesting now, and what we're finding right here is that all of a sudden, instruments that had covered on another up before are now becoming a lot clearer. Let's add the acoustic guitars in. Take notice, they're in mono and they're straight up the middle. ("Happy Birthday" by Patricia Bahia) Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to start to spread these out, but I'm going to listen to everything at the same time and try to find a space where they work and don't cover up anything else. ("Happy Birthday" by Patricia Bahia) Take notice, I didn't do a whole lot of panning, I just came off a little bit on each side, but it really widened up. And now you can hear all of those instruments in the mix really well. ("Happy Birthday" by Patricia Bahia) Then we're going to go to the ukeleles. There's two of them, and it's kind of the same thing. They're doubled, one is up the middle, well, both of them are up the middle, and we'll just try to pan 'em so they're a little bit different than what we have on the acoustic guitars and also the percussion. ("Happy Birthday" by Patricia Bahia) Now, take notice, all of a sudden, everything just got a lot clearer. We didn't add any EQ, we didn't add any more compression, we didn't do anything except, oh, and we didn't change the balance, either, of anything, all we did was changed the panning. Listen again from the beginning. ("Happy Birthday" by Patricia Bahia) Now we have some strings and flutes, and once again, what we're going to try to do is balance those out. So we have a wide stereo spectrum, but everything is in its own space. So these come in towards the end of this section. ("Happy Birthday" by Patricia Bahia) One more time, again, you can see where we're panned here. If you look at the guitars, right here, we're panned a little to the left and a little to the right. One's at 17, the other's at 20. If you look at the ukes, they're both at 31, left and right. If we look at this, we're at 44. We can actually just bring that back, so it's a little closer to the middle, 37. So sometimes, just one or two clicks is plenty. So, to summarize the magic micropanning trick, the first thing is, you want to leave the main focal points in the center of the stereo spectrum. So, in other words, that's whatever's the lead instrument. The vocal, the solos, for instance. Anything with extreme low frequency information, like kick drum and bass, all those things will go into the center, but everything else, you can start to pan away from the center ever so slightly. You're just going a couple ticks at a time, and really, what you need to do is find a space in the stereo spectrum for each of the elements, and there may only be a couple tics different from a previous track, but you'll find that just giving each instrument its own little space in the stereo spectrum will make everything seem to fit better in the mix, and yet you'll hear everything in a lot more cohesive and defined way.