Do mixes have to be symmetrical? I ask this question because there does seem to be an accepted ‘right’ way to mix. It's only a convention but it is pervasive. You'll often see an assumption that the mix will be symmetrical, that important elements will be placed centrally and even from a spectral point of view that there be an equal and symmetrical amount of energy on each side of a stereo mix.

Looking at my own mixes I recognise that I do tend to mix symmetrically. It's probably because of expectation on the part of the listener, and I am also a listener as well as being the person mixing the recording. Mixers want to make it ‘sound like a record’. This isn't a lack of originality it's conforming to listener expectations and that's usually a good thing. After all a mix should support the music rather than distracting the listener from it. However that isn't the same thing as saying that mixes have to be symmetrical.

Listener Expectation

What I'm principally talking about here is the expectation that arrangements will be balanced across the stereo image. The layout of instruments in a multitrack project is decided at the mixing stage through panning and while it's reasonable to place instruments as they might be arranged in a room, in the majority of cases I'd say that probably doesn't happen anymore. Placing parts in the stereo panorama is an artistic choice. So what's so wrong about placing a guitar track on the left and not having a complimentary instrument on the right to balance the mix?

Things haven't always been this way and in the early days of stereo recording there were some wild placements, or what would be considered wild today. In mono all mixes are inherently symmetrical - there’s nowhere for them to be other than in the middle! Confronted with the possibilities of an additional channel to play with, some mixers used this additional channel to highlight a particular instrument rather than trying to build a picture in the stereo panorama. Listening to recordings from the 60s there are plenty of examples of instruments which these days would be placed centrally being panned hard left or hard right. To take a well-known example Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl has hard-panned bass and drums on the left and guitars on the right. It’s unusual but I think it sounds great.

There are some technical reasons why panning important instrument centrally is a good idea. There is an advantage to keeping bass instruments centrally planned if the recording is going to be cut to vinyl, though the Van Morrison example rather flies in the face of that. There's also an advantage in that if the reproduction system isn't properly set up then the most important audio has a better chance of surviving inappropriately placed speakers or a channel being down in the playback system. Placing something centrally also offers additional headroom in a stereo playback system as it is reproduced by both channels of the stereo amplifier. However you could also argue that if the lead vocal is the most important element in a song it should be given a speaker of its own, particularly as time of arrival differences between two speakers will result in comb filtering and haas delay effects. There might well be technical reasons but I’m sure the choice is an aesthetic one.

So to give some other examples of successful records which are mixed asymmetrically we could look to more 60s examples but there are some technical as well as stylistic reasons why there may be some choices which today may be viewed as unusual in early stereo mixes. Some stereo mixes pre-date the widespread adoption of the pan pot. While mixers may have been compatible with stereo, the choices when it came to routing were between left, right or both, as opposed to left, right or anywhere in between. A great example is the Velvet Underground’s The Gift, a record more than eight minutes long in which the left channel is a narration telling the story of Waldo and Marsha and how a gift takes a dark turn, and the right hand channel which is a long, mono instrumental. When I was in my teens it was a well-known trick to turn the balance hard right so you could concentrate on the music and omit the story.

Mixes can also be asymmetrical in the time domain. A great example of this is a technique that has somewhat fallen out of favour in which the dry version of a track is panned to one side and a reverb-only version is panned to the opposite side. Van Halen’s Runnin’ With The Devil uses this technique in which the guitar riff is dry on the left and wet on the other, flying in the face of the accepted wisdom that stereo reverb with the dry audio placed centrally, or symmetrical double tracked guitars is in some way correct. There are many more examples of this and while stereo reverb or delay may seem a good choice there is something to be said for maximising the impact of the effect by having the dry and wet versions as far away as possible from each other in the stereo field.

Left Or Right?

It’s an interesting point that in the examples so far the instrument on which the focus is being placed is on the left hand side in cases where there is a hard panning occurring. The next two examples have this situation reversed with the vocal being panned hard right. The first of these two examples is Prince’s Pop Life in which the vocal is panned hard right and a delayed version of that vocal is hard left.

Returning to panning choices building the arrangement, placing important sounds on the extremes of the panorama is very apparent in this next example and unlike the 60s examples where the novelty of a new format and limitations of available technology might to some extent explain the choices made, in Del Amitri’s 90’s record Roll To Me we find extreme panning in the verses of the vocals which are placed dry and in the right-hand channel with drums bass and guitars in the left. In the chorus the vocals are evenly spread between the speakers but the placement of the rhythm section on the hard left and the Vocals and guitars on the right is very unusual. Possibly a contrived nod to the records of the 60s but it has to be said that far from spoiling the mix, it sounds good. I rather like it.

Both of these examples place the dry vocal on the right. The choice of left or right hadn’t struck me as significant but in a recent conversation with William Wittman he shared his theory that people from western cultures read writing and pictures left to right and he suggests that to some extent we are the same with mixes, if something happens on the left on a mix and not on also the right we expect and anticipate something happening in that ‘empty’ space on the right of the sound field, whereas having something only on the right doesn’t elicit quite the same expectation in the listener. I’d never thought about this before but I think he might be right. 

Mix Tools

A nice example of how preoccupied mixers are about symmetry in their mixes is an example from this video from pureMix in which Chris Lord Alge confesses that he doesn't use the stereo link button on his bus compressors. It's commonly held by the majority of people that you have to link stereo compressors so that if something loud happens on one side then the lopsided gain reduction doesn't cause a shift or movement in the stereo field. Chris suggests that this doesn't matter all it does is add movement and interest to a mix and who wouldn't want their mixes to sound more dynamic and interesting. He raises a good point. Another example is the ‘V’ in mastering. This is a commonly raised suggestion that the overall shape of a well-balanced mix should be mono at the bottom end and should become wider as frequency rises. There are various plug-in products which facilitate this creation of a V shape in tracks. Of course this V is assumed to be symmetrical.

Headphones

One thing which I think does more to explain our current preoccupation with symmetrical mixes than anything else is an assumption that I've been making throughout this article that the music being listen to will be being listened to on on loudspeakers with all the associated cross-talk between channels and the less stark presentation of stereo information which happens on loudspeakers. However I need only to listen to that Del Amitri track on headphones to realise that what is quirky and interesting on loudspeakers is distracting and rather difficult to listen to on headphones.

If something is panned hard left on speakers it doesn't sound nearly as hard left as it does on headphones and vice versa and considering the prevalence of the consumption of music via headphones it's probably all the explanation that we need of why extreme planning is less popular than ever.

However the increasing popularity of Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos, and its distribution as binaural mixes hints towards a future where panning is more interesting and more creative and in my opinion that can only be a good thing. Symmetry is understandable but anyone who has ever placed an instrument on one side and wondered how they will balance their mix might be asking the wrong question. Perhaps they should be asking why should they balance their mix?

Photo by Drew Patrick Miller on Unsplash