pan your drums out of the center

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losthighway
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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by losthighway » Sat May 09, 2020 12:11 pm

MoreSpaceEcho wrote:
Sat May 09, 2020 11:30 am

One of the tunes we did is still one of my all-time faves:

https://drewodoherty.bandcamp.com/track/the-robbery
And oh man, that guy's voice is great! Cool song, the production style is perfect too. All-around winner.

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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Sat May 09, 2020 4:23 pm

Thanks!

Yeah, Drew is a great singer. Here's his solo record, which also has Zach on a few songs:

https://drewodoherty.bandcamp.com/album/starts

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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by trodden » Sat May 09, 2020 5:41 pm

drumsound wrote:
Sat May 09, 2020 11:06 am
The true reason I do it is that it helps me retain focus on the mix. If I have the drums audience, it distracts ME. Therefore I'm not doing me best on listening to the WHOLE MIX because I'm distracted by the hats on the right side. I owe it to the song and my clients to not let something so simple to avoid to get in the way.
This. Totally. And that drummer's perspective is correct, and knowing that More Space Echo feels the opposite, it makes me giggle that he has had to master so many of my (correct) drummer perspective, records.

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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Sun May 10, 2020 9:07 am

I swapped L/R on all those records and fixed it for you. No extra charge!

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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by trodden » Sun May 10, 2020 12:29 pm

MoreSpaceEcho wrote:
Sun May 10, 2020 9:07 am
I swapped L/R on all those records and fixed it for you. No extra charge!
YOU MONSTER!

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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by drumsound » Sun May 10, 2020 11:16 pm

trodden wrote:
Sat May 09, 2020 5:41 pm
drumsound wrote:
Sat May 09, 2020 11:06 am
The true reason I do it is that it helps me retain focus on the mix. If I have the drums audience, it distracts ME. Therefore I'm not doing me best on listening to the WHOLE MIX because I'm distracted by the hats on the right side. I owe it to the song and my clients to not let something so simple to avoid to get in the way.
This. Totally. And that drummer's perspective is correct, and knowing that More Space Echo feels the opposite, it makes me giggle that he has had to master so many of my (correct) drummer perspective, records.
Mine too!

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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by DrummerMan » Mon May 11, 2020 11:07 am

drumsound wrote:
Sun May 10, 2020 11:16 pm
The true reason I do it is that it helps me retain focus on the mix. If I have the drums audience, it distracts ME. Therefore I'm not doing me best on listening to the WHOLE MIX because I'm distracted by the hats on the right side. I owe it to the song and my clients to not let something so simple to avoid to get in the way.
I would actually cite this as the most valid reason (for me) to mix drums audience perspective, at least when I'm the drummer, which is 99% of the time. I think I always did it drummers perspective until the last few years when my band partner expressed a strong preference for audience perspective. I don't care too strongly about it so anything we do together I do it that way. I find that it forces me to actually pay more attention to how the drums sit from a listener's perspective as opposed to how they feel/felt when I played them, and the overall mix is served better in the end.

This is newer revelation for me though, and I still have been mixing everything else from drummers perspective, THOUGH... I just did an IG video where I was demo'ing a cymbal and the camera was in front of the kit and I realized after it was done and posted that the perspective was backwards from what I was seeing. definitely something to keep in mind with video, especially drum-focused video.

Otherwise, I don't think it REALLY matters as long as it sounds good...
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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by joninc » Mon May 11, 2020 1:31 pm

what i meant by the initial (admittedly vague) subject was this:

Most of us center the kit 99.9 % if the time - yes we pan out toms/overheads/rooms but it's focussed on Kick and SN in the dead center ALL THE TIME.

I'm challenging myself to try not doing that some times... see if I can find other creative ways to balance my mix and give a different perspective.

I just did it on 1 song and am awaiting feedback from the artist/producer.
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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by DrummerMan » Mon May 11, 2020 2:23 pm

I'm doing a Beatles cover right now (Good Morning, Good Morning) and am mixing it kind of like, or least inspired by the stereo mix I grew up with. I know people have issues with those for whatever reason but I love them. Obviously, part of that involves hard panning the whole kit to one side (the left here). The bass goes there too, along with the rhodes playing rhythm/pads (substituting for the guitar), where as the guitars are copying the saxophones in the right side with the Brass instruments. This is as far as I've gotten and it's really hard to ignore the meters that are telling me that its very unbalanced, even though it actually sounds pretty good to me so far.

This is going to be instrumental so the lead voices will be flute double tracked and hard panned and the bkg voices will be vibes. I might end up compensating and making the flute more heavily weighted to the right and put the vibes there as well, but we'll have to see when we get there.

It's like that impulse for those of us who've spent most of our lives dealing with recording digitally to look at a waveform and make judgements on how something sounds. Even though I know it's not the way to do things its hard to turn equating the two things off.
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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by drumsound » Tue May 12, 2020 2:11 pm

joninc wrote:
Mon May 11, 2020 1:31 pm
what i meant by the initial (admittedly vague) subject was this:

Most of us center the kit 99.9 % if the time - yes we pan out toms/overheads/rooms but it's focussed on Kick and SN in the dead center ALL THE TIME.

I'm challenging myself to try not doing that some times... see if I can find other creative ways to balance my mix and give a different perspective.

I just did it on 1 song and am awaiting feedback from the artist/producer.
I actually position my overheads so that the BD and SD are centered.

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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by joninc » Tue May 12, 2020 2:32 pm

right - i get that. I definitely try to align my Overheads equidistant from snare top. I want things to be as phase aligned and thick as possible - kick and snare are the main event and critical to get right.

I guess I am just taking a step back and wondering why - in mixing - we are hardly ever pan the kit to the side and always orient it around dead center. I get that we want the sides to be balanced and this is a very dynamic part of most pop/rock so it's easier to balance this way... but is there room for us to play around with this sometimes and be a little more creative with it's placement in the stereo field?
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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by A.David.MacKinnon » Tue May 12, 2020 3:09 pm

As discussed above, those Blue Note records and everything else by Rudy Van Gelder is a revelation in terms of panning. Drums are frequently at 9 or 3 o'clock with the soloist panned the other way. Bleed fills in the sound stage.
It's sounds natural but also super stylized. The panning on his records is like a signature. You can often tell he made the record just from the way the players are laid out left to right.

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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by digitaldrummer » Wed May 13, 2020 11:03 am

A.David.MacKinnon wrote:
Tue May 12, 2020 3:09 pm
Bleed fills in the sound stage.
I think this is key to getting the sound balanced. everyone live in the same room.

But again, this kind of panning is going to sound very different if you are mixing a modern rock/pop/country song. the balanced/symmetric panning is part of the sound we are all used to.
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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by frans_13 » Thu May 14, 2020 4:30 am

I had the topic audience vs. drummer perspective come up not even half a dozend times in 35 years. For mixing live i think the question isn't too hard, right? I had considerable more lefthanded drummers live.

For recording, if the drummer says so and the band is okay: fine. I usually never place the snare in the center of the mix, because it rarely IS in the center of the drumset. Having my overheads not at 90° to the kickdrum but rather 90° to an imaginary line kickdrum-snare, which usually puts them a good deal clockwise, seen from above. To get the whole drumset evenly positioned in the stereo picture in the overheads, then the spot mics are panned to match the overheads. The floor tom doesn't end up far out and the snare does end up at maybe 12:30 or 13:00. I make up for this with the main guitar on the opposite side, so the distribution of level isn't lopsided.

Next time i'll ask the band if i should record the whole thing from "keyboarders perspective". Not.
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Re: pan your drums out of the center

Post by Scodiddly » Thu May 14, 2020 5:33 am

joninc wrote:
Tue May 12, 2020 2:32 pm
I guess I am just taking a step back and wondering why - in mixing - we are hardly ever pan the kit to the side and always orient it around dead center. I get that we want the sides to be balanced and this is a very dynamic part of most pop/rock so it's easier to balance this way... but is there room for us to play around with this sometimes and be a little more creative with it's placement in the stereo field?
Historically it has to do with vinyl records being effectively mono at low frequencies.

I've got a record around here somewhere that wanted to feature a jazz pianist, so they moved the upright bass off to one side. As a result the bass has no low end and and sounds terrible. Maybe a better mastering engineer could have saved that one, but it's not like I can just download a new copy. :x

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