Carlo Libertini is a Melodyne audio editing specialist with Music Marketing Inc. of North America. He’s also an audio production engineer with twenty years’ experience, and performs trainings, demonstrations, and services for top studios and institutions across the country. In between production responsibilities he conducts online training seminars, collaborative production meetings, software demonstrations, and video tutorials.
Of course, Carlo is our resident Studio One expert, too! In this segment, he demonstrates the basics of panning audio.
After setting levels in your mix, the next step is to start placing instruments left/right in the stereo field. This gives listeners the impression of width, and can also make for an interesting listen with creatively used panning. It’s one of the fundamentals of building a mix, usually before any plugins are used!
Panning can be a very useful tool. Combined with automation, which can be found by right-clicking the panner in Studio One, you can do some really fun things with it.
Carlo shows us the difference between center panned elements, and those panned hard left and right. In his mix, there are two acoustic guitar tracks: one labeled “L” and the other labeled “R.” These are two separate performances of the same rhythm guitar part, recorded specifically for the left and right channels. By panning them hard left and right, you can create stereo width!
