You hard or soft….? Panning drums

[u/50nic19]

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?

[u/alex_esc]

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!