Non-traditional panning options - any opinions

I find that with basses in the middle, we get a bit more power but less clarity. We hear the different ranges more clearly with traditional panning. I've heard that the whole "bass in the middle" thing became popular with vinyles because for technical reasons it didn't work well on vinyles with traditional positioning. Something like that, not sure it's true since I ignore the specs of that matter.

But something I do like to do, when mixing orchestra with a rock band for instance, is using mid-side panning to put nothing on the middle but the band itself. So I agree we can vary things a bit depending on the context, but in a rock context, I would be even more aggressive with the side-positioning.

Or if you don't care about "reality" and just want a good-sounding soundscape, there is the other path:
You can play with space as an instrument, as Hans Zimmer do : put close mics on your staccatos if you wan't them to bite, ambient mics on your longs if you wan't them to be enveloping, record musicians on the corridor and then in the room so you can have ambient mics souding like trees and vice-versa.

So you can do pretty much anything. But my two cents: it has to be justified context-wisely.

 

Except it's never quite like that in real life is it? The instruments are bouncing all over the room, including the opposite walls.
If you solo the left channel you can still hear basses/trumpets etc, albeit more quitly (and slightly later).
So your goal should be to recreate some of that virtually.

Personally I dig the L/R thing because it's yet another form of contrast.
High/low, soft/loud, fast/slow, etc.
Moving the listeners attention across the room can be real sexy, obviously more so in real life but..

Sure, just because you want to can be reason enough.
You may want to go for a more modern (movie) style, which definitely has most of the low stuff in the middle.

If your samples are recorded in seating position you might get into some trouble as the room will be 'baked' into the samples.
You can get away with more using close mics.[/QUOTE]

 

Hi and welcome!

That's weird. Is it a problem for only one library?

Only if that's the genre you're going for. By that I mean pop or anything similar. People who've heard orchestral music don't ever really expect that kind of sound when they listen to orchestral music. You can do whatever you want in pop or electronica as long as the end result sounds good. It's the true frontier - people do all kinds of shit you'd never think of and it flies.

Personally, I don't think I'd ever pan a string section hard left or right. Or any section, for that matter. The sound of a section is anything but mono; I'd never mic a section with just one mic. I would be open to doing this in a quartet setting and even then it would be this pop-ish sound where the quartet is an accompaniment and occasionally plays a part or two fully exposed, while a guitar, piano, a singer or whatever is leading the most of the song.

 

Yes, bass sounds better panned to the center of the speakers in many setups. The old school recording technique, and orchestral seating arrangement, was changed to allow for recording/reproduction in mono.

This is particularly noticeable with baked-in room samples like @T.j. Prinssen mentioned, and can be overcome by using the close mic positions (less room sound in the recorded sample).
Some other techniques to balance out/clear up the mix: Mid/Side EQ and compression, EQing/Dampening the reverb, different reverbs for shorts/longs, different reverbs for different depths of the orchestra (strings/winds/brass/chorus/percussion). Some of this is more complicated than it is worth.

I'll see if I can track down some alternative seating arrangement diagrams and post on here (there are some places that perform/record with split violin sections, particularly in Europe. Our seating arrangement is standard here for performance, but you can record in a number of ways).

For some interesting discussion on this topic on other forums, do a search for Beat Kaufmann (a Swiss sound engineer who has some virtual instrument template/reverb info). You may not agree with his approach, but it addresses this topic (alternative panning).

Agreed, and this all gets more complicated when you add dialog, FX, soloists, and rhythm section to your orchestral tracks too. Another topic related to that "real life blend" is sending the reverb early reflections between sections (Mike mentions this method in his template tutorial, and I think there's another discussion on Redbanned).

Great topics (panning/depth/balance & clarity), and something I struggle with too.

 

As I mentioned above, here's some more info on (live) seating arrangements.

I also have some live performance diagrams, but I'll just upload thumbnails:



Last thing on virtual instrument panning, I mentioned Beat Kaufmann (a pretty active guy on some other boards). You can take his approach with a grain of salt, but he's trying to balance out the stereo field (with a virtual orchestra), and you can see some of his methods illustrated at: https://www.beat-kaufmann.com/suite-presets/vienna-ensemble-presets/index.php
That being said, many listeners preferences align with the "American" standard layout above. Hope this helps you down the rabbit hole, but keep in mind the ultimate goals (good mix, clarity/balance, artistic performance, etc.). Cheers.

 

I like the Violas on the right,it somehow it makes the most sense to me but my template is set up 'American' because that's how the samples were recorded.
If you go see a lot of live performances (opera's especially) you'll see a bunch of variations to accommodate for the room, most of them totally fine (except that one time all the woodwinds were totally on the left, that wasn't great)

Still working on mine.. things are finally starting to really click though with regards to the whole z-depth / room thing.
Mike's class was of great help but it took a lot of experimenting after to finally 'get' it.
Basically do what SOUNDS right, not what looks right.

I'm doing a lot of balancing volume-wise in Vepro so I can use the DAW faders basically as a dry/wet slider, but panning is all inside Cubase.

 

I think @Gharun Lacy has a YouTube video with a lot of his plugins/reverbs loaded in VEP. If I can find it (or he's still around here), then I'll post it.