Drum Machine to 424 stereo or mono?

[fendermike]

I know what I plan to do, but wanted to get some feedback from the population at large.

With track space at a premium, I plan to run my machine in "stereo" to two inputs with the machine's sounds panned hard left or right, depending on how much reverb I want to add.

Reverb sounds blooshy on the kick and hi-hat, so I pan these hard (oh... say... left) and the drums that like reverb go the other way. That way I can split the wet/dry sounds up, but still record them to a mono track.

At mixdown, I will add some stereo reverb that seems to bring a little life into the mono drums. For some reason, they sound better to me mono than stereo.

 

[Basil]

Mono is all you need. Use the L on the out. Peter

 

[fendermike]

Actually, I guess I mis-spoke above when I said "what I plan to do is...". I've been doing just that for about 10 years now.

I had a recent flirtation with stereo drums and Deck II on an aging Mac, but latency problems with that computer forced me back to tape.

The stereo really didn't do much for the tracks as far as I was concerned.

 

[SirRiff]

I usually..

Greetings,

Since most drums are kick and snare panned center, it won;t be a big deal to stereo track them. I use an SR-16 and I just can't stand to have cymbols all panned center, so i put them left right and center, that along with toms panned too makes for some cool drum rolls (well through headphones anyways, not sure you could tell through speakers as much).

SirRiff

 

[fendermike]

Re: I usually..

Greetings,

Since most drums are kick and snare panned center, it won;t be a big deal to stereo track them. I use an SR-16 and I just can't stand to have cymbols all panned center, so i put them left right and center, that along with toms panned too makes for some cool drum rolls (well through headphones anyways, not sure you could tell through speakers as much).

SirRiff

It seemed like a cool idea to me once, too. I tried it and for some reason, it seemed to make the groove fall apart, or become dilluted.

It could have just been some bad mojo due to the cassette format, or maybe I didn't get it right, but the stereo machine didn't sound as solid.

I've been listening carefully to a lot of things I like and can't really find radically panned drums anywhere.

Not that I panned mine radically. In fact, I tended to bring everything a little closer together during mixdown to try and tighten up.

What I find, and attempt to describe above, is that using the stereo capabilities of the DR550MKII to isolate instruments and control the wet/dry effect mix is more what I'm after. Then, stereo reverb at final mixdown seems to liven it up just enough.