Panning, or deciding where to place elements in the stereo field, can be challenging when starting out, and from time to time it still poses a big challenge for me – despite the fact that I have mixed thousands of songs in my career. At the end of the day I still go with whatever feels right for panning, but there are a couple of panning guidelines, or starting points, that have dramatically helped my mixes get bigger, wider, deeper, etc.

1) Beatles Panning

I always start with LCR panning, which is sometimes called Beatles panning. This is panning every track all the way to the left, all the way to right or straight up the middle. It is not a law that every track has to stay in that position (even though many times they do), but I use this as a starting point and it has helped my mixes come together faster and naturally sound bigger and wider.

2) Complimentary Colors

One big mistake less experienced mixers make is adding more and more of the same thing to a mix and expecting it to get bigger. In fact, this makes things smaller. For instance: if you have a guitar track and you layer up more and more tracks of that same guitar sound, it will actually rob the mix of size and impact. One big secret for big sounding mixes is diversity of sound.

I try and keep this in mind when I am mixing and making my panning decisions. In a dense mix, I am going to try and pan things together that have complimentary colors, or another way to say this is pan things together that have their energy in different frequency ranges. If I have a big fat electric guitar, I usually do not want to pan another big fat electric guitar in the same place. I will look at panning it with a mandolin, bright piano, thin acoustic guitar, etc. If I have a clean bright electric guitar, I will try to pan it with a fat organ, mellow fender Rhodes, or a fat electric guitar. This strategy even comes into play with panning things against the drums. If I have mixed the drums with the high hat panned off to the left side, I will usually pan a dominant bright rhythmic element (bright guitar, mandolin, shaker) off to the other side to let the high hat shine through without a lot of competition.

Of course, you can find great mixes done differently (including some that I have done), but I have found that starting a mix with these two guiding principles helps get mixes sounding big, wide and powerful faster and with less effort. Listen to your favorite albums. You might be surprised by how many are using this approach to panning.

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