On Which Ear Should I Hang My Hat?

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BenignVanilla

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When you mix your drums, do you mix from the drummer's perspective, IE the hat in the left channel, or from the audience's perspective, IE the hat in the right channel?
 
When you're baking do you use vanilla or chocolate?














It totally depends on your preference and the needs of the project. Just keep it consitant through out the song. So don't put your hat AND your floor tom on the same channel . . . .(I think, I'm not a drummer, but you get my point.)
 
BenignVanilla said:
When you mix your drums, do you mix from the drummer's perspective, IE the hat in the left channel, or from the audience's perspective, IE the hat in the right channel?
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Oh man, there's a 20 plus page thread somewhere discussing this exact same thing.

It basically doesn't matter. It's a matter of personal preference. Drummer's perspective for a left-handed drummer is the same as audience perspective for a righty.

The only time it MIGHT matter is if you have a video for the tune. Then, you probably want to have the drums panned the same way you see them when looking at the band. But for strictly audio purposes, nobody can claim one as better than the other.
 
My bad...I was not asking which is correct...I was asking what YOU do. I know what I do, I hat left always. I was just curious what others do. I did a search, but couldn't find the other thread.
 
BenignVanilla said:
When you mix your drums, do you mix from the drummer's perspective, IE the hat in the left channel, or from the audience's perspective, IE the hat in the right channel?
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I play drums lefty, so I'm very confused ..... I actually PLAY to the audience perspective, or something, IDK..
 
But should it be constant during the album? Does listener get distracted if hihat changes position between the songs? And the same question propably goes for other instruments, say for piano or solo violin for example, especialy if they are panned quite hard.
 
If a listener gets distracted by the hat changing sides on the same album, then the listener's either weird or a geek or a dangerous fan. To be ignored, if you can.
 
BenignVanilla said:
When you mix your drums, do you mix from the drummer's perspective, IE the hat in the left channel, or from the audience's perspective, IE the hat in the right channel?
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For me, more and more the answer is "Neither".

The more I listen to the drums (I've never been a big drum hobbyist to begin with) in a variety of attractive mixes and music, the more I realize not only just how often the drums are not laid out in any kind of "quasi-realistic" stereo spread, but how their physical location is completely artificial and actually dynamically move during the course of the song (e.g. the snare is here for the chorus but over there during the verses, with the toms all the way across the top, etc.), so I've started playing with that a bit more these days.

But when I DO make a standard stereo drum image, it's always right-hand audience perspective. The mix is for the audience to listen to, not the drummer.

G.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
But when I DO make a standard stereo drum image, it's always right-hand audience perspective. The mix is for the audience to listen to, not the drummer.
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I'm the same way.

AFA having drums all over the place and not following any realistic stereo drum layout...I tend not to do that with typical Rock/Pop music.
When I was messing around more with "electronic" music, I might have deviated from the typical drum layout, but even then most itmes I would build my sampled drums into a realistic kit...though I can see where going "artificial" would also work for some music.
 
WIDE? it's already not audience' perspective.

So please, do not 'pull me in nice and close'..


..then make me air drum' backwards. :p
 
miroslav said:
though I can see where going "artificial" would also work for some music.
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I'm not sure how deep your playlist for rock/pop goes, but give it a listen with an ear towards this thread; you might find yourself rather surprised just how common both "artificial" and dynamic drum panning schemes actually are. Simple "natural" stereo spreads - left or right - are almost in the minority in my playlists. And no, I don't listen to "weird" stuff - unless one considers rock, pop, alt rock, blues, classic R&B, reggae and jazz as "weird" ;).

G.
 
I generally do quite wide, unnatural spreads like people have been talking about (really, "audience perspective" is likely to be a narrow central image, unless your audience likes to stick their head in the middle of your kit), but within those I usually put hats to the left...

It pleases the drummers, as they're most likely to be bothered.
At the same time, non-drummers are never going to notice or care.
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
I'm not sure how deep your playlist for rock/pop goes, but give it a listen with an ear towards this thread; you might find yourself rather surprised just how common both "artificial" and dynamic drum panning schemes actually are. Simple "natural" stereo spreads - left or right - are almost in the minority in my playlists. And no, I don't listen to "weird" stuff - unless one considers rock, pop, alt rock, blues, classic R&B, reggae and jazz as "weird" ;).
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I know what you mean.

I guess I was talking about more classic Rock/Pop.
I just always have this idea of a band playing live when I'm mixing typical Rock/Pop, and I even consider that as I track and edit (to a degree) so as not to come up with mixes that are technically impossible for a typical 5-6 piece band to pull off.

With "head" music...Electronic/Trance/Dance/etc...I don't tend to think of it so much in terms of a *band*....as that stuff may rarely be played live by a band, unless they use a lot of pre-recorded sequenced shit during a live performance.
 
Just for poops and grins during an otherwise boring lunch, I decided to test my commercial playlist to see what trends there might be regarding drum panning across the spectrum of rock and over it's history.

I loaded a playlist of about 400 random songs from the 60s to the 00s into Winamp and let it's shuffle playback function randomly select 25 representative songs. My only interaction was to ignore or bypass old '60s songs in mono or obviously mixed (or remastered) into faux stereo or over-simplified LCR stereo, as well as bypass obviously other-genre stuff such as big band jazz or hardcore blues or the like. The rest I left to the computer to randomly auto-select. This is not purely scientific by any means, but I think one can see that there's a fairly wide variety of music styles and times represented here.

What surprised even me was just how little drum panning at all is represented here. By far the majority of samples have everything in the rhythm section just panned center mono. Many of the rest have something custom going on (to more or less of a degree), with just a couple actually using a natural-ish stereo perspective of any type.

I'm not saying that this is my recommendation, by any means (when has anyone here known me to advocate copying commercial trends? :p) Just an interesting sample of what is out there is all I'm offering up, that all.

Here's the list and short descriptions of the drum panning schemes used:

Rick Holmstrom - I'm Gone: Center mono
Primal Scream - Rocks: Cemter mono
Jake Shimabukuro - Grandma's Groove: Center mono
David Mead - World of a King: Snare (intro): Hard right / Snare (verse 1): Center / Toms (body): hard L/R delay / Everything (end of song): Center mono
Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder - Dust My Broom: Center mono
Tommy James & The Shondells - Draggin' the Line: Center mono
Southside Johnny - I Don't Wanna Go Home: Center mono
Clash - Pressure Drop: Snare & hat: center mono / Toms stereo left but reversed
Buddy Guy & Paul Rogers - Some Kind of Wownderful: Center mono
Jethro Tull - Bouree: Center mono/slight (~5°) spread on cymbals?
Sarah McLaghlan - Dear God: Center/mono
Smithereens - In A Lonely Place: Center/mono
The Staple Singers - I'll Take You There: Center/mono
Warren Zevon - the Envoy: Center/mono
Joe Jackson - the Harder They Come: Snare & hat & rack tom:drummer perspective / floor tom: full left
U2 & BB King - When Love Comes To Town: Audience distant perspective
Dobie Gray - Drift Away: Snare: center on verses, hard L/R stereo delay on choruses / Hat: audience slight right / Toms: dynamic panning
Marshal Tucker Band - Can't You See: Center mono
Love and Rockets - I'm So Alive: Center mono
INXS - Devil Inside: W-I-D-E audience perspective w/automated effects
J. Geiles Band - Whammer Jammer: Center mono w/occasional narrow tom spread
Sly and the Family Stone - Everyday People: Full right mono
Buckwheat Zydeco - Buck's Hot Rod: Center mono
Rickie Lee Jones - Dannys All-Star Joint: Center Mono
John Hiatt - Memphis In The Meantime: Snare/hat/rack: Center mono / Floor tom: Hard left

G.
 
I wonder how many actually track a drum kit in stereo...VS...assembling something during the mix from multi-mics and just an ambient OH pair.

But as you demonstrate, there is no set rule about where/how drums should be panned or from which perspective.
I know lots of songs stick the snare/kick up the middle in mono...which will tend to bring the those elements more forward in the mix, and that's cool if it's what you want for a mix.

I find that going with only a stereo drum kit in a mix, the drums will naturally comes across as a bit "diffused" or less focused...and therefore much less of that in-your-face sound unless you intentionally place elements in the center of the mix.
But on a decent playback system....the depth of the stereo drum kit comes through very nicely.

Can't stand listening to stuff on PC speakers or narrow-bandwidth ear buds.... :(
 
Well, one advantage to throwing the entire rhythm section up the middle is that it leaves plenty of room for everything else. this is evident in many (not all, of course) of the examples listed above; just because the entire kit is monoed doesn't mean that the rest of the mix is just as boring, many of them are doing a *lot* with the remaining pan space.

Even when I do a stereo spread of the drum kit - which until recently was my preference - it's usually a pretty tight spread, like mattr describes, a more "relaistic" audience perspective of maybe a couple of dozen degrees at the most, with most of the image coming from a stereo pair (OH or otherwise). If I want to spread the drums across the entire pan space, I actually prefer an "artificial" pan placement (from close mics); it allows me to minimize masking conflicts with other instruments and tends (IMHO) to add more excitement to the mix.*

As far as whether/which of the commercial examples above record the drums in stereo or multitrack and then collapse everything to mono in mixing, I can't say. That probably varies about as much as the sound of the songs themselves do.

* If you want to hear a rather interesting and sophisticated mix, including plenty of dynamic drum placement use (among many other very interesting production ideas), check out the fourth song that came up in my list: "World Of A King" by David Mead.

G.
 
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I don't touch the hihat. It can stay in the center where it seldom suffers from competition with the bass, kick and snare or even the vocal. I read somewhere a long time ago that "the hihat just takes care of itself" and that stuck with me. I'm a firm believer in that.
 
Good posts glen. You got me thinking about how wide the drums are spread in the music I listen, and even though its usually not mono it is much more narrow than I tought. So I've been panning drums of my own mixes propably far too wide, as they always have a billion other things going on at the same time. It might help to keep the drums more on center if everything else (except bass and vocals) are panned quite hard. Maybe Im using too wide stereo pictures overally and leaving the center a bit empty..
 
Joza said:
Good posts glen. You got me thinking about how wide the drums are spread in the music I listen, and even though its usually not mono it is much more narrow than I tought. So I've been panning drums of my own mixes propably far too wide, as they always have a billion other things going on at the same time. It might help to keep the drums more on center if everything else (except bass and vocals) are panned quite hard. Maybe Im using too wide stereo pictures overally and leaving the center a bit empty..
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Along that same line, particularly if you're coming from rather wide, playing with the width also brings a thickening and foucus of tone as you pan in that is an interesting side effect. (I'm presuming most of a kit coming from the stereo pair here not just a collection of close mics.
 
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