Drum panning - when and why?

Yeah drummer/audience perspective is probably the dumbest consideration ever. How that ever gets so hotly debated is beyond comprehension. Just do it the way you want and no one will care.
 
Greg_L said:
Yeah drummer/audience perspective is probably the dumbest consideration ever. How that ever gets so hotly debated is beyond comprehension. Just do it the way you want and no one will care.
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Indeed... I do it the way I do it because I'm trying to emulate real drums via programming and not program things that can't actually be played so I'm always thinking right hand, left hand etc - helps if it plays back that way! And the audience wouldn't have clue one anyway...
 
Greg_L said:
Yeah drummer/audience perspective is probably the dumbest consideration ever. How that ever gets so hotly debated is beyond comprehension. Just do it the way you want and no one will care.
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Agreed.

Like I said, for me it's just the sound of the HH on the right that I prefer, which comes off as "audience perspective" in most cases (unless it's lefty drummer :D)...but it's never a goal that I shoot for intentionally.

It's like when I do stereo piano tracks....the lower octaves are always on the left and the upper on the right, mostly because that's what sounds correct to me (probably because that's how it is when you sit at and play a piano).
To offset having the piano's lower octaves more to the left....if I add some organ/string tracks along with the piano, I may intentionally flip them around so that their lower octaves end up more on the right.

It's really all about balancing the mix...that's it....and little to do with audience perspective or whatever.
 
Greg_L said:
Yeah drummer/audience perspective is probably the dumbest consideration ever. How that ever gets so hotly debated is beyond comprehension. Just do it the way you want and no one will care.
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I cared long before I did any recording, and when there's video it looks odd to see the drummer move right to left for a tom roll while the sound goes left to right.
 
famous beagle said:
But to me that just kind of sounds more like a "because we can" argument
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Bear in mind though, that "Because we can" is almost always preceded by a period of "I wish we could". So the desire to do certain things comes before the technology exists to be able to do it. I'm sure transexual people didn't suddenly appear because the technology enabling sex changes came about. For the technology to come about, someone thought "if only......"
famous beagle said:
rather than because it makes more sense, sonically speaking.
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If you think about it, it was inevitable that with machines that enabled panning, drums would end up centrally in a mix at some stage. Actually, everything has turned up centrally in a mix at some point. But to many ears, only certain things sound good there more often than they don't and they are the things that have tended to remain as a kind of norm. Eventually, they make sense sonically speaking.
 
When stereo came out and became the norm, it was common for everyone to try to gain as much mileage out of the new method of listening to music. As a result, those at the mixing board were often asked to pan the drums so the fit the way a drummer might hear them. This was dead wrong as the drummer's hi-hat is on the left and the low tom is on the right. The audience never hears the drums that way. Once that got corrected, the tendency to pan the drums across the full stereo spectrum remained. Stereo was a novelty and people would do pans back and forth to create motion in the stereo spectrum. This only helped if you were stoned. Eventually, producers realized that the older recordings were much better because the drums were mono since recordings were done using stereo mics on the left and the right. The tendency to over-do stereo remains, as you can tell from this post. I have always done the drums with only the overheads panned left and right. The rest are panned accordingly. Hat slightly right. Snare in the middle. Kick barely to the left. (that's how it sits in the drummer's set-up. The kick is a right foot instrument and not actually in the center). The low tom is slightly left and the chimes or other extras are left in the overheads. The overheads are not stage left and stage right. They are center but close enough to make a richer, wider imaging in the center. The purpose of stereo in a band is simply to widen the imaging a little. To that end, a live recording needs to have a room left and room right as well as the instruments all in the center. Imagine being seated far left and hearing a stereo mix for the drums. Yuck! The room mics provide the sense of depth. I hope that helps. Good luck,
Rod Norman, engineer

famous beagle said:
Just curious if anyone knows when it started becoming standard practice to pan drums in a stereo spectrum with the toms out wide - and why.

It's always sounded very unnatural to me to have the toms bouncing hard back and forth between the speakers like that, since just about everyone listening to a drumset (except for the drummer kind of) normally hears the drums as basically a mono instrument.

I much prefer the sound of older records where the drums are in mono like the other instruments.

I mean ... I can understand recording an instrument in stereo if it's a solo piano piece or something because there's nothing else. But when you hear a band play, you never hear the drums like that.

I know recording doesn't have to represent reality (and I'm glad for that), but I was just wondering why stereo drums have become the norm as opposed to the exception.

Any thoughts?
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It's art. If someone wants to pan drums wide or from the drummer's perspective or randomly all over the place then it is, by their measure, correct. Even my "reasoning" that it looks funny on video if the panning doesn't reflect the image is purely subjective. Obviously for live music you have to be sure people will hear everything, but for studio recordings there's not always a reason to rigidly mimic reality.
 
Thanks for the response Rod; that did help.

Again, I know there's no wrong or right way. I was just curious why it became the norm to treat the drums that way.
 
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