Drum panning

[Dioxide]

O.K. I know the Bass drum and snare need to be centerd. But... when panning my Overheads how far a spread should I give em, hard left and hard right. Or maybe the middle of the center and full? Or a quarter, an eighth, what, what, what. I'm trying to find that pocket that there supposed to be in so when I stick my guitars in there I don't lose the feel you know.

 

[Stealthtech]

Pan as if you were in front of them. Your toms right to left...cymbals right to left...high hat right to center.

Bass & Snare 0
Toms -3r -2r -1r +1L +2L +3L
Cymbals the same
High Hats -2r

If that makes any sense

 

[Gidge]

O.K. I know the Bass drum and snare need to be centerd. But... when panning my Overheads how far a spread should I give em, hard left and hard right. Or maybe the middle of the center and full? Or a quarter, an eighth, what, what, what. I'm trying to find that pocket that there supposed to be in so when I stick my guitars in there I don't lose the feel you know.

trust your ears...experiment until you find the pocket......

that advice kinda sucks but alot depends on how you recorded the overheads so there is no set answer.......

 

[Boray]

Overheads (you have two of them, right?) should be panned hard left-right as any other stereo channel. But of course you can pan this stereo channel a bit if you didn't get the stereo recording completely centered. Snare and kick don't have to be dead center. Listen, and you may find something like -3 and +4 better sounding. You will always get some snare and kick sound from the overheads as well that will "pan" them a bit even if you pan their mics at 0.

This has not much to do with panning, but look out for phase problems! Look at the waveforms and compare overheads to kickdrum, if the low frequencies don't match, then move the whole kick track a bit until they match, else much of the kickdrum's bass will dissappear. Do the same thing for the snare<->overheads. This is also good to think about when placing the overhead mics. Place them at the same distance from the bassdrum so that the kickdrum waveform gets recorded about the same in both overhead mics.

/Anders

 

[Boray]

Btw, if you want to "center" your stereo recording (your overhead mics) without narrowing the stereo field, then adjust the sub Left and Right volumes of the stereo track instead of panning.

/Anders

 

[mixsit]

Sometimes you can trade some width for a more solid image by paning in a bit -or alot. Also, it may fit more naturally the sound stage for the song. Particulaly easy to try if the OHs are your primary kit mics.
/\, -- --, \/ , try them all.
No one likes mono much, but sometime just for kicks, (assuming R&R here), after a song is tracked and mixed, turn the drums in to mono and check out what happens.

Wayne

 

[Dioxide]

Overheads (you have two of them, right?) should be panned hard left-right as any other stereo channel. But of course you can pan this stereo channel a bit if you didn't get the stereo recording completely centered. Snare and kick don't have to be dead center. Listen, and you may find something like -3 and +4 better sounding. You will always get some snare and kick sound from the overheads as well that will "pan" them a bit even if you pan their mics at 0.

I have been doing this with the snare, finding where the OH's veer a bit and pan my snare accordingly, killing the volume a bit and duplicating the track. Then I stick it dead center and mix to taste which gives me one hell of a snare hit (very crisp very beefy)
But I keep getting a weird Phase problem with the bass drum, which it never occured to me to try doing the same thing. Thanx for the jogg of a total mental bypass. I'll have to try this and see if it works.