When you listen to recorded music, can you picture where the sounds are coming from? Can you imagine the room that the musicians are in? Through various techniques and tools, producers and engineers can make it seem like the music you’re listening to was recorded with you in the studio, in a huge room like a cathedral, or even in a room that doesn’t exist. In this section, we’ll cover some features that help to create a sense  of space and place in recorded music.

Panning

Think about putting on a pair of headphones and listening to a rock song. Is the singer right in front of you? Are there multiple copies of the same singer’s voice all around you? Are the guitars on your left, on your right, or on both? These effects are created by panning, or the placement of sounds in the stereo field. The stereo field is a conceptual and visual model of 3D aural space from the perspective of the listener. Generally, sounds are placed to the left, right, or center in the stereo field. Sounds can also vary in their depth, or distance away from the listener, as they are mixed to be quieter or louder. Sometimes, sounds will move across the stereo field from one section to another.

One common panning technique is called multitracking. Multitracking is when a sound is recorded (tracked) multiple times and layered over itself. The slight variations in each signal create a thicker texture. Once each line has been tracked, it  can be panned to varying places in the stereo field to create certain effects. Multitracking is often done with vocals but is common for other instruments in certain genres as well. Some common terms to describe multitracking are double tracking (two recordings of the same line), triple tracking (three recordings of the same line), and quad tracking (four recordings of the same line).

Reverb and Delay

Think about how things sound when you’re in your own room in comparison to when you’re in an empty stairwell. Chances are that the stairwell sounds a lot larger than your room does (and it probably is). Larger spaces allow sound to travel farther and reflect off of more surfaces before it hits your ears, which contributes to their resonance. In recorded music, effects like reverberation (more commonly just “reverb”) and delay allow engineers and producers to create the impression of specific environments with various sizes and complexities.

Delay describes an effect where a section of the signal is repeated a number of times at a regular interval while also getting softer in dynamic, like an echo. Delay is often set in relation to meter and tempo (quarter-note delay, triplet-eighth delay, etc.). Some approaches to delays and delay patterns have their own names:

• Slapback delays are short and usually only repeat the signal once. They happen very quickly after the sound to which they are applied.
• A ping pong delay is an effect that uses stereo panning to alternate the side on which each successive delayed signal is heard.
• Tape delay effects try to emulate the sound of a tape machine. They’re used to create a warmer, slightly distorted sound. They are often said to sound “vintage.”

Reverberation or reverb refers to the sounds of aural reflections as they bounce off surfaces. Reverb is actually the result of a bunch of very short delays, which can make audio sound “blurry”. Reverb tails can vary in length. In general, the longer the reverb “tail,” the larger the implied space is perceived to be. There are four big categories of reverb:

• Room reverbs mimic the sound of a small-ish room. To do this, they use earlier, simple reflections that have short reverberation tails—that is, it takes the sound a short time to dissipate entirely. This results in a more “intimate” sound.
• Hall reverbs have longer decay times (so, longer reverb tails) and more complex reflections to create the impression of a concert hall. This makes it sound like the music is being performed in a larger space. The sound can come off as “blurry.”
• Chamber reverbs sound smaller than a hall, but more complex than a regular room. They tend to sound sort of “unnatural” as a result.
• Plate reverb is generated by playing audio into a suspended metal plate, causing it to vibrate. The reflections from this vibration are captured and form the sound of the reverb. They tend to sound smooth and dark. Unlike the first three reverb types, plate reverb does not seek to imitate a specific kind of room.

While it may be hard to pinpoint exactly which type of reverberation has been used on a given recording, their characteristics may contribute to the creation of an aural space of a specific size or type.