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Gratuitous Panning: Difference between revisions
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The intended effect can be altered by the playback equipment. Two speakers mounted side-by-side in a single cabinet have more crossover than two mounted in opposite corners of a room, and headphones have none at all.
Historically, the decline of the "guitar on the right, bass on the left" type of mixing came about as albums started being recorded on 16 or more tracks, which makes it easy to double-track every instrument. When your mix already has two or more guitars playing the exact same part for the "fatness" this provides, the natural tendency is to spread them out over the stereo field. [[
[[I Thought It Meant|Has nothing to do with]] the practice of [[Caustic Critic|critically lambasting a work without restraint]], at least not inherently.
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* Ted Templeman's main studio gimmick when producing [[Van Halen]] was running the guitar through heavy reverb, panning the guitar to the left channel and the reverb to the right, to simulate a "live" sound, which guitarist Eddie Van Halen resented.
* Velvet Underground: "White Light/White Heat" keeps the drums on the right channel, and separates the two vocalists (Reed, Cale). "The Gift" keeps the instrumentation on the left and the spoken word on the right. "The Murder Mystery" has two spoken word performances by Reed and Sterling Morrison on the left and right channel respectively, and vocals by Maureen Tucker and Doug Yule with the same arrangement.
* [[
** ''Led Zeppelin I'': "Good Times, Bad Times" and "I Can't Quit You Baby" pan the drums to the right channel. "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" does the same to the acoustic guitar.
** ''Led Zeppelin II'': "Whole Lotta Love" keeps the driving riff on the left channel, and furiously twiddles during the middle freakout and was made specifically to be appreciated with headphones. "The Lemon Song" keeps the guitars mostly on the left, "Thank You" does the same but on the right channel, and "Bring It On Home" alternates.
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** ''Houses of the Holy'': "The Rain Song" keeps two sets of acoustic guitars on the left and right channels.
** ''Physical Graffiti'': "Custard Pie"'s main riff is played on guitar (right channel) and clavinet (left)
* [[
** ''Black Sabbath'' mostly pans the guitar towards the left channel, either obviously ("Black Sabbath", "Sleeping Village") or more subtly (exception being "Evil Woman"). "Black Sabbath" also pans the the bass to the right channel, "The Warning" puts the guitar solo on the right channel, and "Wicked World" reverses the guitar-left-bass-right panning of "Black Sabbath".
** ''Paranoid'' mostly shoves the guitar on the right channel and the bass on the left channel, with the exception of "Hand of Doom", where their position is reversed, and "Fairies Wear Boots", "Rat Salad" and "Paranoid", which center both.
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* The Temptations song "Slave" (from ''Puzzle People'') has been described by one reviewer as having "enough panning to make George Clinton dizzy".
* The Sly & the Family Stone albums ''Life'' and ''Stand!'' love putting the drums on the right channel.
* The Cars' song "Moving in Stereo" does [[Exactly What It Says
* Iggy Pop's supposedly diastrous first mix of The Stooges' ''Raw Power'' isolated all the instruments on the left channel and all the vocals on the right (it couldn't have been worse than [[Loudness War|his last one]]). David Bowie was called in for a remixing job, which is in itself a near infamous case of [[Love It or Hate It]].
* Blue Cheer's album ''Vincebus Eruptum'' invariably separates the drums on one channel (either left or right). On "Summertime Blues" and "Doctor Please" the rest of the instruments are put on the left. "Out of Focus" separates the guitar (left channel) and bass (right channel). "Second Time Around" has an entire bass-and-drum solo entirely on the right channel.
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* Wishbone Ash frequently panned each of the lead guitars on a separate channel. It's quite interesting to listen to each one individually, as opposed to both at once.
* "30th Century Man" by Scott Walker.
* "Talk Talk" by [[
* [[Nine Inch Nails]] tend to fool around with stereo more subtly, but they have their more obvious examples, such as: "Gave Up"'s outro, "I Do Not Want This" and "Last".
** On "1,000,000," off of ''The Slip,'' about 2/3 of the way through the song, there's a whisper of "A million miles awaaaay..." panned all the way to the right. In a song with zero panning otherwise, it sounds like somebody's right next to you, speaking in your ear.
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* In [[Joy Electric]]'s spoken-word song "Hello Mannequin", the vocal track abruptly switches from the left channel to the right channel and back again with every single line.
* Miles Davis' "He Loved Him Madly" bounces the low-rumbling percussion between left and right for 2 minutes.
* Hawkwind's ''D-Rider'' features synth parts that [[Playing
* Collective Soul used this on a few songs. "Heavy" puts the distorted guitar intro so that it alternates channels between riffs, and "Energy" did the same with the vocals right before the chorus. The same song also put the vocals for the first verse on the right channel and everything else on the left.
* Don Caballero likes this trope, often splitting two guitar parts between the two channels. Taken to its logical extreme in the intro to "Slice Where you Live Like Pie" (yes, that's the real song title), which bounces between left and right constantly.
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* [[Queens of the Stone Age]] tend to do this, at least, to a larger extent than most modern bands do.
* On the Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, and Paco DeLucia live album ''Friday Night in San Francisco'', the tracks with two guitarists would confine one to the left channel and the other to the right. The remaining tracks added the third guitarist in the center channel. Mind you, these guitarists were the only musicians on the album.
* Post-''Brave New World'' [[
* [[Queen]], "Bohemian Rhapsody" in particular - "Little high" the left speaker is followed by "Little low" in the right.
** Justified in the canon of The Prophet's Song, where voices are separated to make the whole thing easier to listen.
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** Indeed - common on anything engineered by Alan Parsons or James Guthrie, including Pink Floyd or Pink Floyd later solo artists.
** Good luck trying to make sense of the first verse of Dream Theater's "The Glass Prison" if one of your speakers is messed up, on that note. The vocals alternate between the left and right channel, giving it a panicked, uneasy sound, which makes sense - the song is about the drummer's battle to recover from alcoholism.
* DVD example: The stereo remix of ''[[The
** Speaking of ''[[The
*** Also on the radio version, the Vogon voice treatment for the first episode had the voice on the right, and the phasing effect that had been added to it on the left. Rather disconcerting if you take out your right earpiece...
* The Muppets' song "Mah Na Mah Na" (incidentally adapted from a song in a swedish porno) has the monster singing in the opposite speaker to the backup singers, and during the chorus he switches between the two.
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* In Propellerheads version of "On Her Majesties Secret Service" the opening trumpets swing repeatedly from left to right.
* Symbion Project's "the difference between order & chaos is only the distance between your two speakers" has on one channel percussion and a recording of the captain's announcement from an airplane takeoff and on the other channel all the other instruments and the famous "Oh the humanity!" recording from the Hindenburg crash.
* The second part of the song "A Man's Gotta Do" from ''[[
* "Before the Storm" by Joker (off the [[
* The vocals on the final line of the [[Vocaloid]] song ''Wide Knowledge of the Late, Madness'' use this trope to great effect, even more so when watching the video: the repeated 'watashi, watashi' swings back and forth from left to right, creating the illusion of Miku gradually breaking down until the abrupt cutoff.
* The Postal Service's "Such Great Heights" has a similar effect to "Before the Storm"; the song contains electronic beeping that alternates channels.
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* Therion's 2007 album "Gothic Kabbalah" contains a song titled "Tuna 1613" (nothing to do with fish) which does this once, as the only instance on the entire album. It's brief, only done with the guitar, and falls right smack in the middle of the song, but for some reason it really jumps out at you.
* [[Leonard Bernstein]] must have had some kind of deal with Columbia Records to promote quadraphonic sound in the early 1970s. His ''Mass'' opens with what is effectively a quadraphonic sound test with four vocal/percussion ensembles operating independently of each other, and also incorporates an unaccompanied oboe solo which moves around all four channels. For the 1974 revival of ''Candide'', the (reduced) orchestra was spread out into four groups of players.
* The [[Buffy-Speak|fadey outey ending thing]] [[
* [[Leftfield]]'s "[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvXuBUYq-Mo A Final Hit]". Listen to the beginning with headphones. [[Dizzy Cam|Don't forget your Dramamine.]]
* Bubble Puppy's "Hot Smoke & Sasafrass" is a knob-twiddling extravaganza. The stereo placement of both vocals and instruments changes after every line.
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** Of special note is "Dead Is The New Alive". At the start, the instruments ''[[Up to Eleven|cycle]]'' between the two channels.
* "Ectobiology" from the [[Homestuck]] Volume 5 album, when it was released, originally had a panning effect added that made the song swoop from left to right and back again, rhythmically with the music ''for the entire length of the song''. When [[Brown Note|people listening through headphones complained of headaches]], the panning version was removed from the album and replaced with a much less gimmicky one.
* [[
* [[Machinae Supremacy]]'s "Hero" has two guitar solos playing at once, one for each channel. They're written so that one track is shredding while the other plays more slowly and melodically, switching every once in a while.
* "Dan Dare" by the [[Art Of Noise]] has an incredibly jarring panning effect partway in that almost spoils the music entirely.
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* You could use "Go Straight" from ''[[Streets of Rage]] 2'' to test your speakers. The first few bars bounce from left to right every note.
* [[OFWGKTA|Tyler the Creator]] uses this effect at the end of his songs "Yonkers" and "Tron Cat."
* On the ''[[Coraline (
* For [[Stereolab]]'s album ''Margerine Eclipse'', every single instrument on every single song was confined entirely to either the left or right channel--as some folks call it, a "dual mono" mix rather than stereo. Muting one speaker or the other can vastly change how the songs sound.
** On "Analogue Rock" (from the album ''Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements''), the organ is confined entirely to the left channel, while the guitars, drums, and most of the vocals are confined to the right channel. The two channels abruptly flip for a few seconds in the second verse.
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