Ive recently gotten into LCR panning and its turning my view on mixing on its side. I realize now that i was struggling to mix because i wasnt truly making a wide stereo image. that being said im just curious since im new to this, surely there has to be more to this than just panning everything away from your vocals right? i mean do you pan anything between hard left/center or hard right/center? is it really as simple as just panning everything to the walls? I want to know every technique you would recommend trying when mixing like this. My biggest question is where would you put a pad in an LCR mix? if my main synth is already stereo and panned hard left and right, if i put my pad in the middle it would sit on the vocals and the drums which i dont want. But if i made the pad stereo and panned it hard left and right would it clash with my main synth? im enjoying this LCR stuff and i want to get it down to a science

Well... if you want the science of it, the reason LCR panning is effective is because only signals coming from absolutely right or left have a truly unambiguous stereo position, due to physically coming from one place only. Centre signals have a almost as definite position, and furthermore benefit from the strengthening effect of coming from both speakers.

Following from that, you can do some interesting things. For example, you might have your typical kick / bass / vocals down the centre, maybe a guitar hard right and a piano hard left. This would be a pretty clear and definite sounding mix. You could then choose to spread things like backing vocals and pads across the less definite stereo range. These elements will potentially be comparatively floating and ethereal, against the more solid LCR elements.

As for the clashing thing, you should be solving that with EQ anyway. You can't really depend on pan position to take care of this, as many listening situations are either actually mono - eg single speaker radio - or de facto mono; if you get far enough away from a pair of speakers you're effectively hearing a mono composite. So mono compatibility is always something to be concerned with.

So i can stack things on top of each other hard left and hard right and they wont sound crowded if theyre EQ'd properly? also what do you mean by spreading the pad and backup vocals across the less definite range, you mean spread them between hard left/center and between hard right/center? And when a listener listens to an LCR mix in mono does that mean theyre going to not hear one side?

No, mono playback will collapse the two channels to one channel mixed together. So you hear both signals, but lose the positioning information. You can easily test what a mix sounds like in mono by clicking the stereo interleave button on your master bus.

Regarding the EQ thing, yeah, you'd ideally want to be solving clashing issues there, for this reason and many others. Another issue is that a mix can sound kind of lopsided if you've got a really significant frequency range mismatch between right and left.

gotcha. so in an lcr mix are you still able to do some things in mono, such as bass lines or would it sound out of place? i havent tried this yet

Depends exactly what you're asking here. For something to be strictly LCR, then all your tracks would be mono, and paned to one of those positons. A stereo track has whatever panning the source has. For example, most piano soft synths will have a stereo output and you'll notice that the lower notes are to the left and the higher notes are to the right. So your stereo piano or pad or whatever has some positional ambiguity when you use it in stereo mode.

This is one of those things that you can over=think quite easily. I think the first point I made here is the most useful thing I've said, whatever that's worth. Basically, mono signals at hard L, C or R are very definitely positioned. Any other pan position, or any stereo recording will by necessity be less precisely placed, due to the limitations of the stereo illusion. I guess that's the thing to remember; stereo *is* an illusion, kind of like the audio version of 3d glasses. You actually can't place something 10% left in a truly definite way. You can verify this yourself by moving a few inches from your listening position and noticing how the stereo image changes. The power of LCR is that those positions are definitely "there, there and there" in most listening situations.