Hi all,

I was hoping some of you could share your tracking and panning
techniques. What I have found is that it is so tempting to doubletrack
everything so that it doesn't need to be localized on the stereo plane
and then you're not stuck with one track which you don't where to
place. This creates a messy mix which I am beginning to hear more of
from top 40 artists.

What I have tried doing is panning a rhythm guitar track hard left and
adding a stereo delay to the track so as to spread it over to the
other side and in the centre a bit. This leaves room for the vocal and
room for a different inversion or instrument like piano on the right.
I add stereo delay to this as well to push it to the left and centre.
Overall I like this sound better than leaving the piano stereo and
doubletracking the guitar. As long as they're playing at the same time
to counteract eachother, especially in the chorus. What I find is that
the reason why I use delay so much is it makes the hard panned
isntruments work when listening in headphones. Hard panning sounds
weird with no effect to blur it into the stereo field for the other
ear to hear.

Are there other methods of hard panning mono tracks and effecting them
in a way that allows the other ear to hear them with headphones? Apart
from reverb obviously? I want to know this because I might not be
doing such a sustained song that needs so much delay, I might be going
for a more dry sound.

I guess what I would like to know is,

1. Do you tend to doubletrack everything
2. If not, then how do you tend to spread single mono tracks around
the stereo field and localize them well enough to tolerate them in
cans/phones. Wigh delay, reverb, something else?

Thanks in advance
Dave.