When working with sound, it’s important to think about how your intended audience will listen to your final product. Gone are the days when a good chunk of the population had hi-fi setups in their living room, people are on the go now and listen to things on cheap earbuds or in their car on the way to work. Unfortunately, for most people, the best speakers they own are in their car. While you can’t make people listen with better headphones, you can make some basic changes to the mix so that it will sound better on worse equipment
The easiest way to make something sound good quickly is to move some things off to one side and some to the other. This technique is called panning.
Take this song for example: A Marshmallow World by Dean Martin (headphones are reccomended)
Dean is in the middle and the background singers are coming from the left side with the instrumentation on the right. You can clearly hear everything, nothing covers anything up. In short, it sounds good.
Panning isn’t just important for making music sound good, it also helps video too. In Star Wars, the lightsaber sounds match up with the motion of the lightsaber, you don’t hear just a flat hum the whole time. They woosh and whir with each movement and blow.
When Darth Vader activates his lightsaber to the right of Luke’s face and on the right side of the frame, the sound also comes from the right side. When a lightsaber moves back and forth the sound follows. This may seem like a basic thing, obviously sound coming from an object would follow that object, but it’s an important part of filmmaking and something sound designers take very seriously.
In most audio editing software, it is usually represented by a slider that starts in the middle and you slide it however far right or left you want the sound to come from.
Panning can take something good and make it great, and to top it all off, it’s made very easy with today’s technology.