'retro'/hard panning key elements in contemporary records?

[Harmony Head]

Hi all..

I'm doing a bit of a study at the moment in the use of what some may perceive as 'retro' panning techniques. By that i mean things like drums or bass or vocals being panned hard left or right at mix time.

I'm actually looking for some contemporary (last 10-15 years?) examples. Steve Earle does lots of this, and Buddy Miller a little too. Does anyone else know of others i can investigate? I've done it a lot, and love hearing it.

The crux of my argument is working out whether it's actually creatively a valid contemporary choice, or whether it is JUST a retro choice. I want it to be the former, but am concerned that my study is proving it to be the latter!

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance..

HH

[rwc]

a lot of the retro panning was actually devised by idiots who "remixed" it for stereo

the crap that happened to the beatles was blasphemy.

[Harmony Head]

a lot of the retro panning was actually devised by idiots who "remixed" it for stereo

the crap that happened to the beatles was blasphemy.

ok... that may be a valid point, but, with all respect, was not the point of what i was asking.

And even though some may say that these idiots mixed things 'wrong', there's no denying the impact listening to mixes this way had on a whole generation of young producers/engineers!

Anyway.. any suggestions?

HH

[cgarges]

Mitch Easter's Dynamico has some excellent examples of this kind of thing.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[roygbiv]

Mathew Swwet's "Girlfriend" album has a lot of "retro" panning too. Great album.

[Cellotron]

A lot of Daptone Record's releases mixed by Gabe Roth (aka "Bosco Mann") feature elements typically left more up the middle instead hard panned.
http://wwww.daptonerecords.com

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[kayagum]

Nothing drastic, but Sun Kil Moon's "Ghosts of the Great Highway" has some cool hard pans on it.

[DrummerMan]

A lot of Daptone Record's releases mixed by Gabe Roth (aka "Bosco Mann") feature elements typically left more up the middle instead hard panned.
http://wwww.daptonerecords.com

Best regards,
Steve Berson

Just as an alternative view on his stuff, here's a link to a kind of rock album that was mixed by Gabe. You can hear some hard panning fun in the 3rd tune, "Blank Page Good Gun". Obviously, even though this was recorded in the last 5 years, It would be hard to classify anything out of Daptone as contemporary.

[fossiltooth]

I've been digging hard panning a lot of elements as of late. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.

I still haven't had the balls to hard pan a whole drum kit or a bass, or a lead vocal throughout a whole song and print it as a final. Maybe someday.... I guess it's just a little TOO blatantly retro for my tatses. But hey, as soon as it makes sense for a mix I guess I would do it. I think in this day an age it would be a novelty more than anything. But I guess a touch of audacious novelty is OK from time to time.

[andris]

The Low album Drums and Guns has some hard panning happening.

[DrummerMan]

I was just remembering the first album I recorded in my own commercial studio. It was a weird experimental chamber jazz band and it was recorded to 4-tracks. Horns were surrounding a stereo XY pair, and the Drums, bass and keys was all premixed down to the other two tracks. I was playing drums, so I had to figure out to make it work without being able to tweak as I went along. What I ended up doing is having the drums (2 mics only) hard panned to the right, the keys hard panned to the left and the bass in the center. My thinking was that this might give me some flexibility to change some aspects of the mix afterwards, which it did. While mixing, though, we all found that it sounded really good and balanced with it panned the way it was and we finalized the mixes as such. I had purposely put the trumpet and high horns on the left side of the XY pair to balance out the cymbals, and it worked really well. I didn't even notice anything weird when listening in the car.

Unfortunately, the label that was putting out the album put up a stink about the panning and sent us an email just assuming that we made some kind of mistake in the bounce or something. It was kind of an annoying passive aggressive way to say that he didn't like it. After a bunch of correspondence back and forth we agreed to bring the drums and keys closer to the middle, and that seemed to work for the label.

I don't know what the actual point of this story is except that different people have different expectations of how something's supposed to sound. This was an avant garde jazz label and I guess I hoped they would be into something interesting and different, but, honestly, I think they were used to hearing just a stereo mic (probably going into a minidisk player) in front of a stage or in a shitty sounding room, and while I respect that conceptually, I've heard MANY of those attempts at "just capturing the true essence of what's going on" just sound like crap. I personally like using the studio as something different than what it sounds like live, because I actually believe that you can never fully recreate the experience of being in the middle of a live music performance. The albums that come closest to that feeling for me are usually ones that have obvious "studio" production techniques and "tricks", if you will. In that vain, I like to take things to the somewhat extreme in terms of going with hard panning and weird shit, not for the sake of being weird or anything, just because I like the effect it has on the music when done well. Then again, I don't really make contemporarily sellable records for a living. If I did, I can imagine going up against as much resistance as I did with that first record.

[T-rex]

I love hard panning when it works in the mix. Jerry Finn did this alot and talks about it in the Mixing engineers handbook. He said something to the extent that where he started their console had pan pots but they changed the sound in a way he didn't like. So he usually just swtiched the channel to left, right or center of the mix bus instead of using the pan. Regardless, that Superdrag album 'Headtrip in Every Key' that I am constantly going on about has alot of this. Acoustic guitar hard left and a hihat hard right, playing off of each other etc.

[mjau]

Pearl Jam's 'Vs.' has lots of hard-panned guitars.

[cgarges]

Oh yeah, lots of the Tchad Blake/Mitchell Froom records have that kind of thing going on.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[drumsound]

Fiona Apple "When the Pawn" has a lot of what feels like L-C-R panning the song Limp comes to mind immediately.

Stone Temple Pilots "Tiny Music" this is a more adventerous record from them. Even the super poppy "Lady Picture show" has most of the driving guitar way to the right. Percussion and other ear candy on that record are mostly hard panned or way out to the sides

Anything involving Tchad Blake will have some elements of hard panning. Check out the Mitchell froom record Dopamine or Los Lobos "Colassal Head"

Whilliam Whittman has said here and over at GS that he does L-C-R on everything but the drum close mics. Those are panned o match the hard panned stereo OH.

I did a mix a few years ago with the drums on the left and bass on the right. There are breaks between the verses and I had them swap and for the chorus they are mono center. Everybody really diggs it, but the leader of the band said, while making the next record, that he can't listen to that song on headphones with the bass and drums flying around.