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I can't say I'm on the same boat here. LCR tends to not work so well for me, I find my imaging gets lopsided. I used to feel that the pan controls in PT were blurry, but in a proper monitoring environment it's a little more accurate - as accurate as volume differences can be to yield a phantom image.
Imaging is a weird sort of thing for me. I do it by feel, and I'm not entirely sure what I expect to get out of things. One thing I do know for sure is that panning things hard left and hard right does NOT automatically yield a wide image. It only works if the two elements work really well together in the center.
I've been revisiting the S-1 Imager plug-in recently. I have to say, it's really pretty cool - especially now that I'm focusing on doing my mixes with mainly volume and pan exclusively - trying to touch the eq and compressor as little as possible.
I think of all the things I struggle with most, it's good imaging. The way volume effects the balance of things is a lot more predictable and easily recognizeable than the way pan position does. I know I'm doing a pretty good job though if I feel like there's depth in the mix before I've added any reverb.
With live instruments I use a lot of room mics. I track almost everything with a room mic. I generally use the room capture as an audio map for pan positions. With drums specifically, I'll aim the room mic so that the center aligns the kick and the snare to dead middle, and coordinate the OHs to sound right at hard left and right. This leaves a little out of center position for the hat and toms (and other brass if I happen to be miking those).
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