One little thing I noticed a little while back. When studying some of my favorite records from the 60s and 70s, I’d marvel at how well they pull off hard L-C-R panning, without making my ears twitch while listening on headphones.    Hard L-C-R panning, or “assignment”, was practically the only possibility on older consoles such as the REDD.47 and REDD.51 of Beatles/EMI Abbey Road fame.

These days, with in-the-box, DAW mixing engines, and all modern consoles, mono sources can be panned to any position in the stereo field.   But perhaps they shouldn’t.   We have a long history of great recorded music that features hard panning, and it sounds fantastic. It simplifies mixing, and renders obvious any arrangement problems that might be masked by mashing tracks together.

One of the secrets to making hard panning work is mic bleed. Just a bit of bleed makes it sound natural… wide, but natural.  I.e, if you record two guitars live, and hard pan them, you will get a bit of each guitar in the other’s mic.  That is “bleed.”

Unfortunately, you don’t always have bleed to make things sound natural. If you record two “paired” tracks separately that you want to hard pan, consider crossing their reverb sends. This works great for two acoustic guitars, for instance. Left guitar, send to a verb panned hard right. Right guitar, send to the same verb panned hard left. Balance levels to taste, then bask in your cleverness.

If you are mixing digitally/ITB, with no tape or console crosstalk, and everything you are mixing was tracked separately or is an arranged track (midi/samplers/etc.), the complete separation can sound painfully artificial. Since you’re going to hell anyway, you might as well make the best record you can… so cross pan your reverb sends, and create some fake bleed along with everything else.

Works for me at least.