whats the best way to pan drums

[djessence]

i was just curious to know if there was a generic range to pan snares/kick/hats/bass. should you pan the kick on the other side of the bass? and what about snares in relationship to the kick?

 

[Blue Bear Sound]

Most engineers will pick a perspective - audience or drummer, and mix that way.... audience may be a bit more common.

What is pretty rare is mixing it up (toms from one perspective and the rest of the kit from another), although there really are no rules about it....

Go with what sounds best to you.

Bruce

 

[Kendog]

Eesh... be careful if you're going to try something different... and panning kicks and bass is generally considered different. There's all kinds of room to experiment, and that's good, but you should probably leave the kick, bass, and snares up the middle. Anything else and people will fall over while listening to your mixes. The kick and bass combination give more power and punch than any other element except, perhaps, a huge wall of guitars. Treat them as one giant instrument and you'll be on your way to making nice, tight mixes.

 

[fenix]

i tend to pan to where there is the less possible chance of mic phasing.

 

[cbcbd]

I believe that unless you plan on panning the entire kit to one side then the kick and snare should remain in the center. There is just something innatural about kick or snare to the side when you have overheads that are panned left and right.

Also, for the tom and overhead imaging, just do whatever you prefer best. On one demo I recorded the toms were panned from an audience perspective and since I was the drummer it sounded weird. Other people might not even notice the different panning or don't even have an opinion.

Try listening to some bands that you like and see how they pan their drums. I've been doing that and am realizing that I prefer the drummer perspective of panning.

cbcbd

 

[Blue Bear Sound]

i tend to pan to where there is the less possible chance of mic phasing.

You deal with phase issues with mic placement during tracking -- it's not very professional to have to tell the client you can't pan the drums correctly at mixdown because you fucked up the mic placement on tracking!

Bruce

 

[fenix]

let me clear that up. I pan my condensers to where they have the less phasing because I use 4 overhead condensers (2 overheads, one ride, one hi-hat) and they can get some bleeding sometimes that will lead to some phase cancelling if i'm not careful.

 

[LongWaveStudio]

hmm, fenix, im not sure i understand what you're doing.

djessence, be carefull, when you're panning your toms, make sure they match the overheads (i.e. dont have the close mic'd left tom on the left if it is on the right in the overheads).

it can cause a confused stereo image:-0

some people prefer to have a wide stereo image of the kit, some prefer a narrow, almost mono. depends on the song really and the sound you want to go for.

 

[postalblue]

i've tried doing both wide spaced and xy overhead micing, and it sounded like the xy was more focused, kind of mono-sounding, even with both mics panned hard right and left. i like wide spaced better though.
kick and snare are 99% of the times dead center from what i can tell by listening to modern pop/rock records.
as for toms, i don't have enough inputs in my mixer, so i don't really worry about them.

adriano