In the early days of audio you had a device that recorded sounds onto cylinders. Phonographs then played back the recordings. Both used what is called Mono sound, or single speaker playback. It is not a lifelike way to hear, because our ears give us a (mostly) 360 degree radius of hearing.

Things didn’t change much till the invention of stereo. Stereo uses two speaker channels to give a more real hearing experience. By creating what has become known as the stereo field. With stereo, sounds can come from both speakers equally, or more from one side or the other.

Modern surround sound takes the concept a step further. By adding rear speakers and a center speaker, and optionally side speakers, you get a realistic representation of live hearing. Things can be made to sound like they are coming from almost any direction, and to be honest I’m surprised no one has installed speakers on the ceilings and floors of theaters yet.

The importance of the stereo field in music is creating separation for the various elements that make up the songs. With mono sound with everything coming from just one speaker, or using stereo and not shifting anything to either side, the sounds tend to get muddled together.

With stereo it becomes easy to give each part of the song it’s own “space”. Even shifting a sound only a little bit to one side more than the other can make a large difference. You can also use slight changes with the reverb effect to help create the illusion of differences in distance.

For example, lets say you want to do stereo work for a rock band. Now your goal is to make it sound like the person is setting right in front of the band while they play the song(s).

Lets start with the drums. Drums are situated in an arc around the drummer. So when you set their place in the stereo field you need to keep that placement in mind. The kick drum will always be centered, with the other drums being positioned to each side slightly, and with some slight drops in volume as the drums move further back.

There are 3 ways to get the drums recorded properly.

First, you can go all digital and use a drum machine, or other synth, then use whatever tool(s) your arrangement program has to set each ones position in the stereo field.

Second, you can set up a live drum kit and record it with two or three mics at the same time. One for the left speaker channel, one for the right, and if at all possible, one in the center. You might have to record several take just to figure out where the best place to stick the mics is, but it does work.

Third, you can get a live drum kit mic’ed up with a drum mic kit. Which is a set of mics that are clamped to the drum kit to record as many of the individual drums as possible. Doing so requires a pretty large number of mic ports, and a mixer to get things right.

After you have the drums the rest isn’t too hard. Vocals are usually panned (pan is the term for moving a sound to the left or right in the stereo field) center, or maybe off to one side a bit.

Something to keep in mind is there are no rules you have to follow when it comes to making music, just guidelines.
Bass and the lead guitar are usually panned slightly off to either side away from each other. If a keyboard player, second guitar player, or both are in the band they are generally panned away from the lead guitar and the bass is panned with it, or center. However, even when instruments are panned to the same side, you never want to have them at the same setting. You want to make each one stand out.

Well now you should have an idea of how important the stereo field is when you are making music, and that you need to spend time working on how things are heard within it when you make your songs.

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Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: stereo field, how stereo works, how surround sound works, stereo music production, music producer