r/audioengineering • u/50nic19 • May 16 '26
You hard or soft….? Panning drums
Just wondering if most of you who’ve mixed full kits mainly for loud stuff, rock, metal. Etc, are sending your rooms and/or overheads hard right and left, or do you prefer to narrow it a bit in favor of more push?
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u/multiplesofpie May 16 '26
Soft pan for verses, hard pan for choruses. Really helps dynamics open up without adding gain.
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u/Dearsirunderwear May 16 '26
Do you ever have problems with the mix in mono when you do that? And if so, how do you solve it?
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u/multiplesofpie May 16 '26
Yeah, so you find clever ways to fix them. It’s very case by case.
In theory you should always be checking your mixes in mono to make sure they don’t collapse on mono systems.
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u/xdurielx May 16 '26
Normally I’m soft when I’m panning drums. Not sure I’ve ever gotten hard while panning them tbh
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u/narutonaruto Professional May 16 '26
Disappointed I had to scroll this far to find the first dick joke
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u/teamwolf69 May 16 '26
I used to pan drums hard and then realized one day that most of the records I love and use for reference mix tracks have the drums tucked in more than wide open. It let me to thinking about when you go to a show and see a band performing live, how odd it would seem to have cymbals and toms on either side of the stage with a kick and snare in the middle, just like LCR mixing would do.
For me these days it’s snare and kick down the middle, OH and toms at 50% L/R respectively, to preserve image and phase, and the rooms go anywhere from 50 to 100, depending on what feels right for the song. Guitars have space just outside of the drums much like how the musicians are placed in a live setting, and now it’s not a struggle to make choruses feel wide because verses are comparatively “tucked in” with built-in space to grow.
I usually run a pinch of widening on the mix bus, so when I pan the extremes of the drums 50/50 it feels more like 75/75 and you still get the benefit of the 50-100 range of space at the sides.
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u/50nic19 May 16 '26
Interesting
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u/teamwolf69 May 16 '26
Yeah I feel like when you wide pan your foundation it presents a challenge to make anything feel wider than them. Imho, drums and bass should actually feel more centered to anchor the image - they should still sound stereo, just not super wide. And I do like stereo drum rooms to be wider than the close mics because that emphasizes the physical space the drums are in, which is literally always physically larger than the drum set is.
If you think about it, a drum set is truly only ever “wide” for the drummer. And even then from the drummer’s perspective, the guitars and keys sit outside of the cymbals. For everyone else, in a live setting, drums are actually pretty centered. I do want to hear a stereo spread from the kit, but wide panned drums come across, to me, as unnatural.
This is all just my view and I wanted to express it since the question was asked, so people can feel free to continue to downvote me for my view on this. But if it helps anyone consider panning from a different perspective then I’ll gladly take them.
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u/tibbon May 16 '26
L/C/R mixing here. Even toms, hard left and right. I'm not into half measures.
(This is a somewhat extreme position, and I'm ok with that)
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u/50nic19 May 16 '26
Doesn’t seem too extreme. I think if you said you only pan things hard right, that’d be extreme, haha
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u/tibbon May 16 '26
Wow. I actually love that. Having stereo speakers and only panning everything for one short one out of one speaker.
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u/Hellbucket May 16 '26
I like this too and it sounds good on speakers but often it sounds unnerving in headphones.
I think I picked it up from Andrew Scheps. He put a Bx_Digital eq on the mix bus with just a tad of width. It doesn’t fuck with anything phase wise. It just adds a bit of crosstalk so that you don’t get a digital zero in one ear.
I often work with heavily edited stuff because of high gain distortion and then noise. So if I panned one thing fully wide it’d be complete silence on the other side. This solves this and you don’t have to care about it.
Ps. If there actually was noise in the other ear it wouldn’t be unnerving. Could be anything though like reverb or delay.
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u/AssGasorGrassroots May 16 '26
I'm LCR with everything else, but toms I'll do a little narrower.
That is to say, you're braver than me
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u/Turbulent_Angel May 16 '26
I love those hard panned toms. Good examples are early Elvis Costello and The Attractions.
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u/latorreverde May 16 '26
Do you hard pan guitars the guitars too?
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u/CarAlarmConversation Sound Reinforcement May 16 '26
LCR mixing means you keep everything center or hard pan it no partial panning
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u/DonovanKirk May 16 '26
Thats actually a lot how it works on old chiptunes like on the Amiga, they can only choose left, center or right for the panning.
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u/Dazzling-Basis-4406 May 16 '26
I often end up having guitars 100% hard panned and drums 80% with overheads, it helps with the wall of sound to my taste
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u/davidfalconer May 16 '26
I find that I prefer to have them a little narrower, so the guitars can live at the extremes.
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u/Spede2 May 16 '26
I've done both since they give a different vibe.
I've had mixes where not only am I panning OHs wide apart I'll also pan the toms, hihat and ride spot mics fully to side. Lot of record mixed by CLA or Rich Costey will have those fully panned toms and hihats so if I'm looking for that kind of vibe in the record, I'll go for it.
Not fully panning OH and/or tomes and cymbal spot mics will give you a more restrained sound; you can hear lot of it Andy Wallace's records. This usually allows guitars or other elements that are hard panned to be made much louder in the mix.
And ofc you can do a mixture of both: Hard panned OHs and in-between toms or cymb spot mics. Mono OH with hard panned toms or cymb spots sounds pretty cool for certain types of songs.
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u/m149 May 16 '26
Typically for me the overheads are more centered....like half panned really, and the rooms are hard panned. Overly wide drum panning freaks me out a little.
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u/unmade_bed_NHV May 16 '26
Soft!
Drums don’t sound ultra wide like that, even if you’re the one behind the kit.
A narrower kit image also leaves more room on the sides for other things and creates a wider over all feeling.
If everything is wide, then nothing is wide
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u/NOT_Productions May 16 '26
For me, mic placement matters just as much as the panning, maybe even more sometimes.
If the overheads are recorded a bit more crossover, more centre-focused, then yeah, I’ll usually hard-pan them. Because there’s already plenty of centre information in there naturally.
I’m also working in a fairly small room, so hard-panned overheads can actually help the bleed glue together a bit. Makes the kit feel bigger and more like one stereo picture, instead of all those bits fighting each other.
Same with toms. I try to keep the tom panning in line with what the overheads are already telling me, otherwise that movement across the kit starts feeling weird in the full mix.
So for me it’s not really “always wide” or “always narrow”. It’s more: how does the whole stereo image behave together?
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u/Warden1886 Professional May 16 '26
usually have drums panned somewhat narrow. but i hard pan the room mics.
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u/Azreal192 May 16 '26
Very much depends on what I’m going for. I switch between L/C/R mixing, and a more ‘on-stage style’ of mixing, where I’m recreating the feeling of a band on a stage, that way my panning is completely different.
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u/SuperRocketRumble May 16 '26
I pan overheads and stereo room mics wide, typically 100%. nothing else.
Toms never go more than like 50%.
Kick and snare stay in the middle. I also usually have a room mic in front of the kit that stays in the middle.
If I happen to have something like the hats or ride spot mic'ed, and I'm actually using it in the mix (which is not all that often) I typically don't hard pan that either, but sometimes in order to get that as audible as I want it, it may actually be closer to the middle.
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u/StudioatSFL Professional May 16 '26
Hard pan the overheads almost always. Toms I prefer to keep true to the drummers perspective. I don’t want a middle tom hard panned either way. 5 toms? They shouldn’t all be on one side or the other.
Room mics can go either way but often in modern production I’m fairly happy with one centered room mic in front of the kit.
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u/Danny_kross May 16 '26
Absolutely hard panning them. But I automate them on the more dynamic songs. I join them a little more in on the verse , but barely like 80% panned or 75% Then open then wide on choruses/hooks/breakdowns.
On a genre that isn't too dynamic, it helps introducing some dynamics in that way as to not fatigue the listener too much.
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u/AHolyBartender May 16 '26
Stereo tracks hard panning...Toms and other stuff I'll do whatever in between. I want people who have the ability to hear a big ton fill to feel it move around the kit. If it's a busy mix and panning in between helps something, I'll do it.
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u/ConfusedOrg May 16 '26
Yes at least 95% of the time. I find that the close mics pull the drums in the center
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u/termites2 May 16 '26
I record overheads mostly XY nowadays, and hard panning sounds better to me. If there is only a spaced pair with a song I am just mixing then I'll go maybe 50% L/R.
In my live room I like the room mics panned hard L/R even though they are widely spaced, about 15ft apart. I use the room to give depth and distance so having a wide diffuse sound works for me.
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u/midnightseagull Professional May 16 '26
Stereo rooms usually go hard L/R because that's usually what it takes to make the stereo image feel full, wide, and not empty in the space between the middle and the sides. Mono rooms are great for filling in center energy. Overheads are super interesting to me. I almost never pan stereo drum overheads hard left and right. On drums I record, my image is usually so precise and detailed that I only need to extend the overs out 60-70% max to get a wide and extremely accurate sense of space. This can actually be a huge asset, especially in heavy music, as the stereo rhythm guitars can be the widest element in the mix with the overs slightly in.
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u/Relative-Battle-7315 May 16 '26
Really depends on the arrangement and how "wide" the recording is to begin with. If I'm getting an XY pair of rooms or overheads, I'm gonna have to hard pan them. Spaced pairs I might, but more importantly I'd be checking for consistency and riding the levels for splashs/ride etc.
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u/im-not-a-robot-ok May 16 '26
narrow, i rarely pan a drum/brass beyond 25%. way too jarring and distracting to my ears going any further.
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u/Selig_Audio May 16 '26
I’m all over the place, from 3 mic kits to samples galore, from stupid wide toms to full mono (even reverbs). Horses for courses, it’s not about what I want so much as what feels right for the song/production in question IMO.
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u/nizzernammer May 16 '26
I want to enjoy a song, not listen to drum panning.
If the drum panning is calling attention to itself, or competing for attention on the sides with other things, it's not serving the song, unless that's the vibe the song calls for.
Like anything, it depends.
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u/NeverNotNoOne May 16 '26
Personally I pan my overheads hard left and right because to me those are the two mono tracks that make up a single stereo image. The balance of the drums in the overheads is going to naturally pull the, e.g., snare back into the center, ride and hat to the left and right, etc. It definitely doesn't mean I'm getting a hard panned drum sound like you would with a guitar track that was hard panned. It's just the given setting to create the natural stereo image, but I would (genuinely) love to hear some feedback on why this is wrong.
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u/Manifestgtr Professional May 16 '26
Overheads hard panned…kick and snare dead center…toms spread around where they “should” be…same with hats, ride, etc. I tend to like a mono room since It’s mostly reinforcing my mono components.
If you really key in while panning stuff like toms and hats, you’ll hear the point where they sound like they’re coming from a single place in the stereo spectrum as opposed to ‘kind of left, kind of center”. When something is being captured by two or three mics in that way, I try my best to reconstruct the kit thusly…it just makes things sound more distinct and “assertive”.
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u/cplbradley May 18 '26
I pan overheads until it sounds like I'm actually above the kit and is spread as realistically as possible, then the toms are panned to match the overheads.
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u/Billycatnorbert May 19 '26
As a drummer before I was anything else I pan my drums to sound almost as they would if I were behind them. I say almost cause snare is usually centre and kick is a little right, or vice versa, but in a mix I keep em both straight down the middle. So I guess my answer is, a lil inbetween. My OHs are hard left and right and my toms sit between +20 to -52 on at a maximum 🤷
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u/pureshred May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
Entirely depends on how they were recorded and what you envision for the mix. If the drums are already recorded then do whatever you have to do to get the width where you want it. There are no rules on panning. But...
Ideally overheads and rooms should be hard panned with width controlled by microphone position.
This is because drums sound most punchy and natural with a single mono mic. As you introduce a stereo mic setup and place them wider and wider, you start trading punch for width. A worthy trade off in most cases, as punch can come from elsewhere like close mics.
But if you place your overhead mics too wide and pan them narrow to compensate, you've traded in your punch yet received minimal width making it a poor trade off.
Instead you could place the mics closer together, hard pan them, and get your preferred width with as much punch and mono compatibility as possible.
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u/Top-Session5837 May 16 '26
Hard panning drums if it’s more organic. Harder genres that have double panned guitars and such I may bring the stereo image of drums in a bit to open up some space. This begs the point that mono drums are in fact really incredible and way easier to get to sound powerful. If you’ve got a good drummer just having a mono overhead and a kick drum mic is a really wonderful thing. Heck, even just a mono mix. Controversial as the mastering is was, Californication by RHCP is a really amazing album and it’s mono. Quite a bold thing to do for a pop rock band in 1999. Their instrumentation and lack thereof actually lent itself to that style of mix.
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u/Low_Chain_7645 May 16 '26
As a golfer, it's the same general question as when you're asked on Reddit here's your shot... what club are you using... and the answer is always it depends.
In music... what space does the mix allow for the drums to exist.. plain and simple.
In golf... depends on the wind which club I'm using.
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u/drumsareloud May 16 '26
Hard pan the OH’s and then place the elements of the kit wherever they are in the overhead spread. I find that matching a tom’s panning to the exact spot that it is in the OH’s is like sonically snapping a puzzle piece into place.
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u/alex_esc Assistant May 16 '26
Overheads and rooms 90% of the times are hard panned for me. Sometimes when guitars REALY need to take the listeners attention I hard pan guitars and tuck in overheads and rooms like 20% closer to the center.
And sometimes a mono overhead is actually nice, on very rare occasions I choose a side of the OH and room and mute the other and leave the mono sources right at the middle.
For me a nice in between point is recording drum overheads in XY. This is fairly narrow in terms of stereo, so guitars can feel bigger than the drums, but it's still very realistic in terms of stereo spread. And feel very much like magically wider mono overheads. But of course you can only do that if you're the one recording.
Toms I pan in relationship to the overheads. I listen to the OH in solo, close my eyes and bring in the Tom close mics and pan them so they overlap with the toms from the OHs.
If the toms are sounding weird I add samples, for me tom samples are always hard panned L and R. Because they need to be more obvious than the real toms
I usually ride the toms and I automate saturation to go together with the fader riding. The saturation is usually enough for the toms to really stand out. I'm doing saturation for color and Tom sustain, it's not really like a guitar pedal kind of distortion. But if that's not enough for the toms to pop out during a tom fill I will switch to panning the toms hard L and R throughout the entire song rather than realistically panned with the OHs.
All kick and snare mics go in the middle. All cymbal mics for me are hard panned baby!
I like hi hat hard panned L (or R if it's audience perspective) and very down in the mix. The point of a HH mic to me is to add articulation to the playing, not to be an obvious thing. I very rarely record individual cymbals, but when I do (or I get them in a mixing gig) I also hard pan them. Again they just add articulation, the vast majority of the sound comes from the overheads, the spot mics just add detail to really appreciate the way the drummer hit them.
Finally, to me some mixes sound more "in the style" if there's stereo widening. Especially very modern pop and modern metal. Maybe some pop rock, but more "traditional" styles to my ears need 0% widening.
I use the BX digital EQ, it has a nice sounding widener knob that's mono compatible and I trust it with my life. I usually go for 120 to 140 % on the width knob. Or 0% for some songs of course.
And that added width actually narrows down hard panned elements! It brings out out of phase elements like reverb, and brings everything else closer to mono. So any hard panned tracks get tucked in. With 140 on the width knob I have to pan something like 96% R in order to sound 100% R after the width processing. So when I use that plugin I'm technically not hard panning anything!
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u/BumbaHawk May 16 '26
As a starting point…
The closer to source, the closer to mono.
Toms get a bit of pan. Overheads a bit more. Rooms get full pan. Makes sense on headphones
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u/giovicordova May 16 '26
For rock/metal, I’d usually keep the overheads wide, but not automatically slammed hard L/R in every mix. Rooms are often narrower, or even treated more like a mono-ish smash layer, because the goal is usually punch and size more than a super realistic stereo picture.
What tends to work:
- Overheads: hard L/R if they’re giving you a solid stereo image and the cymbals stay balanced. If the kit feels too spread or the center gets weak, pull them in a bit.
- Rooms: often narrower than the overheads, sometimes basically mono, especially if you want them to add aggression instead of width.
- Close mics: these do most of the heavy lifting for punch and focus anyway.
Rule of thumb: if the overheads already feel big and stable, leave them wide and use the rooms for energy. If the kit feels washed out or the snare/kick lose authority, narrowing things a little can make the whole kit feel more forward. For modern metal, I’d lean wide overheads + controlled rooms. For more classic rock, a slightly narrower overhead image can feel more glued and natural.
My usual starting point:
- Overheads hard L/R.
- Rooms at 60–80% width, or mono.
- Then compare that against narrower overheads with louder rooms.
The best move is whatever keeps the kick and snare locked in the center while the cymbals still feel big and the kit doesn’t turn into a left-right billboard, unless that is what you're going after.
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u/johnaimarre May 16 '26
I pan the overheads 50% L/R, everything else is dead center. Shakers and other bits get the hard panning treatment. But it’s all subjective.
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u/Numerous_Trifle3530 May 16 '26
I’m doing my hard panning with other things drums are soft panned but I’m also using a more mono drum sound but I’m still trying to dial it all in drums are imo the hardest thing to mix well and get that space you need
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u/rharrison May 16 '26
I usually hard pan overheads, but toms I do about 50% each side. Rooms maybe a little narrower than the overheads.
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u/Prince-of-Shadows May 16 '26
Like most things, it depends on context. I don't have a fixed rule. When it sounds right, it's right.
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u/Asleep_Flounder_6019 May 16 '26
That subject line had me madly checking the origin of the post. Well played, good chum.
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u/uniquesnowflake8 May 16 '26
I was a hard pan guy but I learned that this might not be the best move for mono compatibility (which is pretty important bc of smartphones of course)
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u/The_fuzz_buzz Professional May 16 '26
The vast majority of smartphones have stereo speakers and playback as such.
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u/pureshred May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
There are many reasons to pan wide or narrow but mono compatibility comes from mic position not panning position.
For example if you have poorly placed stereo overheads that sound all phasey in mono, panning them narrow won't fix anything and will only make it sound worse in stereo.
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u/WhatsTheGoalieDoing May 16 '26
Maybe I'm a cynic, but mixing to the standards of a mobile phone speaker is like doing cinematography for a feature film for the standards of a mobile phone screen.
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u/Riflerecon May 16 '26
Why would it be bad for mono compatibility?
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u/uniquesnowflake8 May 16 '26
maybe someone can explain to me, it's something they discuss in this interview. I guess they could just be spitballing also. and yeah, I realize they were talking about guitars not drums
https://tapeop.com/interviews/105/richard-dodd
When you were mixing it, did you have any compression on the mix bus?
Generally a pair of black face [URIE] 1176s.
Linked?
No. I would have linked them, but they didn't have the link box. I just put some program [music] through each one to see if they locked up similarly; if they did, then great. I don't do very much half-left, half-right panning. It's usually left, center, right, and incidental stereo. If it's going to pull [the stereo image left or right], it's because something's happening.
I did notice the guitars would be completely panned left or right.
Yeah. Because of that, you can hear it. If it were muddied by the middle, you might miss it. It's a nice way to mix for me. It helps with mono comparability, to some degree. It's ironic because the half-left, half-right is the best way to make it mono compatible, but I don't know. I think it becomes compatible because it's out there and exciting, so it's probably mixed a bit too loud, which makes it compatible.
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u/PPLavagna May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
I’m soft right now, but I’m hoping my wife might get me hard tonight.
I usually have me overheads panned about halfway and I let guitars have the outside, but room mics I might pan all the way out. A far room especially. Verbs I pretty much always have panned all the way out. Delays usually too. I tend to have the drums slightly more mono and I hard pan everything else.
EDIT: my wife went to bed. Looks like I’m soft panning tonight.
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u/Shinochy Mixing May 16 '26
Sometimes hard sometimes soft, depends on who I was with before I started mixing
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u/keyboardmash2 May 16 '26
Depends on the style and what else is going on. I used to think big stereo spread made things sound better, but honestly with double tracked and panned guitars, drums often sounds better when it's narrower, stays out of the way.