ardour-tutorial/content/mixing-sessions/panning/index.en.md

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title = "Panning"
description = "How to pan signal in Ardour"
chapter = false
weight = 3
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Once you have established a good balance of levels on all the tracks, you can
begin to think about panning.

Panning helps to establish a _stereo field_, a relative space between the
speakers in which to place your sounds and instruments.

## The Panning Interface

The panning control in Ardour is located in the middle of the mixer strip.

A mono track will have a mono panner. It looks like this:

{{< figure src="en/ardour7-mono-panner.png" alt="Mono panner" >}}

A stereo track will have a stereo panner, like this:

{{< figure src="en/ardour7-stereo-panner.png" alt="Stereo panner" >}}

### Mono Panner

The default mono panner distributes 1 input to 2 outputs. Its behavior is
controlled by a single parameter, the *position*. By default, the panner is
centered. You can change the position by clicking and dragging directly on the
mono panner. Right-click on the panner to access other options.

### Stereo Panner

The default stereo panner distributes 2 inputs to 2 outputs. By default, the
panner is centered as well.

## Panning Tricks

A more extensive discussion of panning philosophy and techniques is beyond the
scope of this tutorial, but here are some general rules of thumb:

* Guitars tend to be panned to the left and right.
* Vocals and bass tend to placed in the center. You want to create
a balance so that one side is not louder then the other.
* Headphones may be helpful in determining how instruments should be panned, and
whether the mix feels lopsided because one side is too loud.

Two other tools that are useful in creating a "spatial" or stereo field are
_Reverb_ and _Delay_. These effects can be used together with sends to
create a drum send which would be further back in the mix with more Reverb, and
a vocal send which might have a little more Delay but sound closer than the
drums. Please see the sections on using plugins and sends later in this part of
the tutorial for more information.

{{% notice tip %}}
Always keep an eye on your levels while panning tracks! Panning a track to one
channel increases the level of that channel. This may change the balance of
levels you set up in the previous chapter, and in extreme cases can result in
clipping. When this happens, reduce the overall levels of that track and check
again how it sits in the mix.
{{% /notice %}}

## Multichannel Panning

As Ardour supports multichannel tracks, it will also provide a
multichannel-specific panning user interface for those tracks as well. Here is
an example of a 4-channel audio track. You can see that there is a small user
interface right in the mixer and a larger editor window that you can access by
clicking anywhere in the empty space inside the panning area:

{{< figure src="en/ardour7-multichannel-panning.png" alt="Multichannel panning" >}}

Unless you work on projects where e.g.
[Ambisonics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics) is involved, you will
probably mostly deal with multichannel tracks when you use samplers,
especially drums/percussion samplers. As different instruments in a drum kit
tend to get a different treatment in post-production (e.g. how they are
processed with a compressor), samplers tend to create a channel per
instrument: one per kick drum, one per each snare etc. The idea is that you
would route a channel into a separate bus and process it differently. Using a
panner control in that case is unlikely to happen.

## Continuing

By now, you should have a collection of tracks which are both mixed well and
have an exciting stereo image. In the following chapters, we will learn about
using plugins to enhance the sound of your mix.

Next: [USING PLUGINS](../using-plugins)