Panning Question

I've gone through phases (no pun intended) with panning my drum overheads.  Anything from 25% (10/2 approx) to full L/R.  Anyone have a starting preference.  The more I do the full LR panning the more i find it difficult to seat other things in the mix... I guess like anything its relly up to the song to determine how things should be placed, just wanted to know if anyone had their own "method of madness".

I'm not an expert but I think you are right about letting the song dictate. But it also depends how they are mic'ed too. If their is stereo weirdness (i.e. not perfect placement) of the stereo mics, then closer panned usually seems to be less distracting. But I like to start out hard L/R and see how it goes. I don't know, I get myself with these rules on how to do things, then it stops the creative-ness. Like everything its all about balance. What about the hard panned mono drums from the old stereo recordings?

I forget what album I was working on (nothing of very much consequence) but it was fun in the fact that all the toms and everything were sample replaced, and that is usually bad form, but for this record all things considered it was ok, and then we just used the overheads in mono and hard panned the toms and it worked. Gave a lot of contrast to everything else. I'm interested to hear what other people do.

I would say it depends very much on how the OH's are positioned, A/B or X/Y. In the latter case, I find it quite normal to have them panned almost 100%, but with A/B, I find that I have often to close the pan, like 9/3 or 8/4. Same with toms, but it's true that it depends very much on the song and the general orchestration.
I recently recorded a track that has a rather dense arrangement, 10 tracks of horns, 8 tracks of BG vox, some kinda "spectorian". I find out that I had to mix almost in mono, except for the reverb returns, in order to get the density I wanted.

If it's hard to fit the other elements in the mix try a single overhead or fok plus s/k. Be bold and bury the drums a little. Drums have been overrated for way too long.

If you're not taking chances and living on the edge of discovery... Meh.

Cheers,
jb

I tend to pan my drums out fairly wide but when I do that I tend to not pan other instruments as wide, drums eat of a lot of sonic space and a lot of frequencies so easier to have them further away from other instruments.