What are your preferred drum panning solutions?

It appears that many people pan their drum overheads hard left and right. Sometimes ever the floor tom goes hard L or R.

But I find that when I do that it feels like I (the listener) am right on stage with the drummer! That is, it feels unnatural. Somehow I feel that I get better results from a sound stage perspective if I do not pan the drums beyond about 10 o'clock. This then makes the drums sound more in the back of the stage, and gives me the option of placing instruments (e.g. a guitar or mono organ) in the hard L or R positions.

Any comments on this?

Len

Oops I meant 8-9 o'clock!

Len

Do a quick "drum panning" search and you'll find a lot of answers.

You know, a lot indie artists are doing it the 60's way: Mono overhead with little or no panning of the miked pieces. I've done this for myself to create some loops and found it to be rather pleasing. A centered drum sound is pretty cool and allows it to be more powerful in some sense. Think about it, if you're standing in front of a kit, the span of it is only about 5-6 feet on average. You really only hear stereo imaging of a span like that in real life, if your shins are touching the bass drum. If you stand back, you barely hear any difference except for room reflections, but that's a whole other concern, but one worth considering.

Where you put your drums has to do with the song, the band and the production, in that order. If you have great guitars that can work the corners, then mix the drums inside and make a huge stage. That's my favorite way to do it. Not long ago you had to be pretty radical to NOT pan your drums hard left and right however.

If you want to hear how to do it perfectly, get Let It Roll by Little Feat. End of story.

Best Regards,

Bill

for typical pop/rock, I have a mono room mic panned center, stereo OH's panned between 10-2 and 9-3. toms are slightly panned, typicallyw with rack toms panned just slightly off from center, and floors maybe an hour wider than that. Bsically I go for what I would be hearing if I was in front of the kit, audience perspective.

funny. i always do the opposite. player's perspective (drum fills go left to right). it messes with my brain if i do it the other way. i'll reverse the channels at the last minute if the artist prefers it, but i try to keep it player perspective as long as possible for my feeble brain to deal with.

-d. gauss

I use drummer perspective as a starting point as well.

I think "audience perspective" is a misnomer...like Gaotu said, to really hear the drums spread out like that from the audience perspective you'd have to be right up on the drumset. True "audience perspective" is mono, or pretty close to it. As a drummer, if I hear drums panned I like it to be drummer's perspective, which is really the only natural way to hear drums panned like that (or if I'm listening to Phil Collins, I'd like to hear him panned audience perspective...watching him play kind of freaks me out). Then again, we're not always going for natural sounds...

-Duardo

Only if you have just one ear.

The key is not to draumatically pan anything hard L/R.

If your only concern is what sounds natural then I would agree about not panning hard on drums. But most of the time I'm just mixing a song and I'll do whatever I want that fits. Sometime it bugs me to have a tom fill go across the stereo field, other times the drummer may just hit a big high-low tom bang that sounds really nice spread out.

I'll start with drummer perspective and unfortunately seldom go back and actually play with it after everything else is up. For me it's a question of time and habit. About every 6 months I just sit back and remind myself "there are no rules". Just play with it more and if you end up back where you started then that's ok too.

What I've been digging is mono drums (single omni, actually) with bleed from other instrument mics or room mics providing the stereo. Which is probably a lot like audience perspective, where most of the hard L & R stuff is reflections. It's amazing how stereo things can sound with just a tiny bit of stereo room mic'age on mono drums.

I think the psychology of it all determines how the drums are panned. If one mixes as from atop the drummer's throne, then the purpose is to affect with the rhythm from the control room as it were. If one mixes from the vantage of an audience member then the purpose is clearly to be affected by the beat. How the drums are heard from these different points of perception ultimately will determine the panning.

SIDizzzout!!!

Personally, and I think this question really boils down to personal prefference, I like to hear a pan on the oh mics. I won't pan them hard but will pan very close to hard. I also slightly turn the snare and floor tom, but just a hair. I leave the kick center and mid toms center. Then I send everything to mono for my reverb and that puts the image back together to give me a little bit of a room presence that kind of blends everything together. The bands that I have been working on want things to be intimate, so that kind of brings you close to the action so to speak. I feel it gives a better sense of being right in front of the band, like a private performance.

This is totally the opposite of what I do (and see others do) in LA rock sessions.

I like Audience Perspective...

Of a left- handed drummer!

While personally I prefer to pan my drums at the 10-2 or 9-3 range, i have to agree with VerySoon that most "big guys" pan hard almost all the time. In fact, I see alot of them pan the toms way way out the too.