Too much stereo spread on drums and piano?

[James Lehmann]

A friend (the artist) just handed me a copy of his latest jazz CD.

It sounds great - the compositions and the playing are all first class, as is the recording which lists Brauner, Sanken mics and Fearn pres, all mixed and mastered in nice expensive studios etc etc

But there's one thing that really bothers me in the mix though, and it's a common occurence I've noticed on albums of many different genres; the drums and the piano are spread out FAR too much across the stereo field!

I mean unless you, as the listener, actually stuck your head into the instruments in question, there's NO WAY this is a realistic sound. Can anyone tell me how if you are sitting listening to a jazz trio you hear a piano disappearing off into your right ear as the player plays a run of high notes whilst the bass notes thump away only in your right ear? And is there really a 10m gap between the floor and the kit toms?

I say, no way José!

Why do some engineers go in for this artificial panning trick, especially on a Jazz recording?

[Level]

Why do some engineers go in for this artificial panning trick, especially on a Jazz recording?

Probabaly because they were asked to. I find it to be a "widespread" issue myself.

[doorknocker]

That's a great point! I often wondered about this too, and not just in jazz i.e 'realistic' recordings. I especially hate tom fills that are spread wide, it's just lame in most cases.
I would say the same thing about the 'height' or 'size' of (especially) drums. If you picture it in your mind, a lot of records have drums that are big buildings with a tiny singer peeking through the kick drum or something.

Andi

www.doorknocker.ch

[Level]

I had a killer mix with Bass, drums, guitar and vox and it really sounded like you were in front of the band. I had the bass at 10 o'clock, guitar at 2 o'clock and the drums right between them with the exception of the cymbal licks having some "side wall reflection" when crashed. It was great! The band wanted it to sound like "rush" so they were the overriding factor and the wide panning ensued. Trends...trends..everyone wanting to be like something else. "Bill, it sounds too 'mono' for us". Yep..thats the deal folks. Brushes on a snare panned at 5 o'clock. Some people want to do things "like heard elsewhere because it sold well".

Nevermind distribution or AR..we did not get that far. I did keep a copy for myself with the sweet accurate mix. :) Bass leaning left with the kick in the center was to die for in realism.

Reminds me of a story where a band wanted everything in the left channel and delay only in the right..so they could sit the speakers in front and behind them. I'll take some of what they were smokin'

[hollywood_steve]

Personally, I'd say that 4 out of every 5 records I listen to have silly (bad, wrong, unlistenable.....) stereo spreads on drums and/or piano. Unless an audience member was sitting with his head on top of the kick drum, the entire drum set should only stretch a little bit on either side of the center. (assuming the kick is centered between L&R. but the same idea holds true even if the drums are located someplace other than straight ahead. ) Why do so many mixers place the hi-hat on the extreme far right of the soundstage and the floor tom at the far opposite side? The drummer would need 40ft arms to play that kit!

My basic rule for a few years now has been to use the main stereo pair to define all panning. All spot mics are panned to reflect an instruments position in the main stereo pair. I'll be using a variation of that method this week on a jazz combo where I need to record both the drums and the piano with only a single mic for each. At mix time I'll bring up just the main stereo pair and make a sketch of all instrument locations, usually referenced against the top half of a clock face (from 9 o'clock = full left, to 12 at straight ahead, to 3 o'clock at full right). Then when I bring up each spot mic, it gets panned to the position on the sketch. (sounds more complex than it really is)

The result of all this is that the recording sounds lifelike and you can actually picture the band set up in front of you while you listen to the playback (without having nightmares about drummers with 40ft arms!)

(and the same thing goes with pianos; I have never been to a concert where the piano's keyboard stretched across the full width of the stage.)

[hethaerto]

I always figured the reason for panning piano and drums so wide was to hopefully engage the listener's fantasy of playing the intruments himself. Playing a piano sounds wide while you're sitting at the bench. While playing drums, the kit wraps around you. A psychological approach to draw the listener in.
Allen

[fifthcircle]

This method of engineering bugs the heck out of me too... When I do jazz stuff, I pan to give the instruments an image- Piano from Left to about 1 o'clock or so, bass in the middle, drums from 11 o'clock to Right. Gives you enough blend to get an ensemble feel, but yet a good solid image where everything has its place. I also tend to minimally mic things in my jazz sessions- especially on the drums. I do a single mic- usually stereo in front of the kit. I have used a single mono mic on the drums, though, and gotten a great sound in an older style recording.

--Ben

[AdAudioInc]

Most if not all of these comments seems to be about jazz - I would just add that for rock and other styles BIGGER is better and big stereo is a method of achiving that. And wrong? I don't think wrong applies.

[Level]

Rock is a whole different deal. It is creative control, mind games and selling repetition. The only rules that really apply is to make sure you get paid and everyone is happy...

1/2 the rock out there is the same 'ole shit redone again..

Quality rock like Iron Maiden just don't come along too often..if you like that sort of "rock" Mostly cobweb rock these days, rehash in the microwave on cold toast.

[joeq]

I sometimes like panning a piano really wide to make a hole in the middle for the vocal or lead instrument. Even when I do, the piano seems to "sit" more on the side of the high notes.


As for drums, well I'm a drummer and when I am sitting in front of my nearfields I wish I could get the floor tom even more to the right. So many of us are mixing on speakers 3 feet apart, we forget what things might sound like on bigger systems.

I'll have to go 5.1

Unless you are picking up the whole band with two mics, your mix is all illusion anyway.

[cgarges]

It's interesting this came up because I've been thinking about this a lot lately. (I've had a huge influx of jazz sessions in the past two months.) Just yesterday I was listening to a James Farber recording that I though sounded fantastic, but I was surprised that the only thing in the center was the kick drum and the upright bass. The toms were hard panned! I was surprised to realize this was going on, but this is a record that for years I've thought sounded great, so who knows?

Whenever I think about the sound of L-R spread on a piano or drumkit, I think about the players' perspective. When you sit at a piano, the low notes come from the left and the high notes come from the right. When you sit behind a right-handed standard drumkit, the hi hat is on the left and the floor tom is on the right. True, it's possible to make this uncomfortably extreme, but I think players who want their instruments represented as how they sound from the playing perspective (after all they make technique adjustments from that perspective) have a good reason for wanting things represented that way.

What bugs the daylights out of me is a hard-panned audience perspective drumkit. When you're several (or many) feet out in front of a drumkit, you don't primarily hear the floor tom in your left ear.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[Tibbon]

I've actually been trashing the other engineer that I work with recently alot (just to his face, not to clients) that he's too 'trying-to-make-it-sound-big-and-modern' with his panning.

Check out the panning on some of these greats:

David Bowie- 'Space Oddity'
Hendrix- 'Foxy Lady'
Any Beatles recording
etc

I'm personally really against everything being so symetrical, spread, and at the same time... really mono to me.

I hate the guitars double tracked, panned hard L/R, overheads far L/R, toms at 9 and 3, Snare, Kick, Bass, Vox in the middle, and keys hard L/R. It's just too basic and bland for me. But, it gives everyone in the room the 'same' picture (guy on the right side of car won't have anything in his right that he doesn't have in his left), and a huge wall of sound.

One night, after a client left... we sat around, I pulled up the client's mix, and proceeded to trash all the overcompression that he had on everything, as well as pan things 'creatively'. I made it more like a band in a room. It was a brit/rockpop band, kinda like Oasisish. The drums were arranged nicely on the right side of the room, with a room mic panned about 10:30ish, the bass was on the left, around 9ish, guitar ( took out all the double layers), was a little farther right of the drummer, the vox were around 11, but bgv where the instrumentalists were placed (as if they were actually singing them) around the room), and the keys were pretty far left. It was awesome. i saved a quick bounce and we talked about it, but we decieded to stay with the original mix, because it was a 'wall of sound' and it the mixer wanted it 'big'. Whatever, mine was better, and actually a little creative. :)

I'm currently moving into a kinda retro phase with it, and panning some vox even hard left or right.

[James Lehmann]

Originally posted by cgarges
I think players who want their instruments represented as how they sound from the playing perspective...

Well this is the crux of it isn't it.

I would have thought the reverse, ie that most players would prefer that the listener hears the instrument from an audience perspective, especially if other instruments are involved. The effect of extreme panning spread on the piano in, say, a jazz trio setting is that it envelops the other instruments which is very obviously not the case when you listen to said trio onstage; the sound of the upright bass does not emmanate from the middle of the piano, neither is the floor tom in the same physical location as note C7 on the piano!

[Tibbon]

James, you are right, but remember that most musicians are just a bit egocentric, and think of the world from their view...

An experiement. One day let each member of try band try their own version of the panning scheme in general. I bet each will be almost from their own perpective. The Pianist, huge piano, guitarist, huge wide guitar, drummer..... drums all over the place... singer, vox harmonies all over the place... bass player... up the middle and loud as hell.... etc..

[cgarges]

Originally posted by James Lehmann
I would have thought the reverse, ie that most players would prefer that the listener hears the instrument from an audience perspective, especially if other instruments are involved.

Yeah, but jazz guys are a pretty self-important lot! (I'm kidding, of course. Making a good deal of my income playing jazz, I reserve the right to make fun of jazz guys.)

That's a really good point you bring up. Just for the sake of argument, take for instance what a panning setup might be for a jazz trio from the pianist's perspective (and most of the pianists I've worked with have wanted that player's perspective left-right spread): L-R spread on the piano, bass slightly to the right of center, full drumkit to the right of the bass. This leaves an awful lot of clutter potential competing with the right hand space of the piano, which typically carries the melody, and not much filling up the left side of the stereo spectrum.

Of course, another option would be to just ORTF mic each instrument and wash it all with tons of reverb like the early-to-mid nineties Keith Jarrett stuff.

By the way, have you heard Tchad Blake's Bad Plus recordings? I think those are incredibly exciting-sounding modern jazz trio records. It's nice to hear a bit of his asthetic applied to that type of music.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[Trp]

Most of favorite recordings of the old days don´t have a "natural" image, almost none of the great Blue Note and Columbia recordings. In a club you wouldn´t hear Miles on the right side, Wayne on the left and Tony´s ride all over to the right either! And it´s more extreme on a lot of the Blue Note stuff - I guess due to technical reasons.

I don´t feel the need for a stereo recording to sound absolutely realistic image wise. To me a recording is not equivalent to a documentation of a live situation. It´s an art form in it´s own right - at least to a certain degree.

I like wide panorama on drums, especially on the cymbals: two of my favorite engineers work that way, Al Schmitt (always player´s perspective) and Joe Ferla - listen to the Dave Douglas stuff.

But I think a big part of it is how the sources are miced. I don´t like piano panned hard L/R when it´s close miced, which gives you that extreme hard-left/hard-right panorama. I prefer true stereo recordings like using (sometimes two omnis as) spread AB near the arch, 2-3 feet away from the strings anyway. If you pan those hard you still get a wide image but not those ascending single note runs that go from hard left to hard right.

Bad Plus is really extreme, panorama wise. But it works great for that kind of music I think. Same thing applies to EST. Those bands have different sound esthetics anyway, so the mixes can reflect that as well in my opinion.

[cgarges]

Originally posted by Trp
Joe Ferla

Oh man, he's one of my favorites, too. I love the sound of those TJ Kirk albums!

Originally posted by Trp
Bad Plus is really extreme, panorama wise. But it works great for that kind of music I think.

Agreed 100%!

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[drundall]

Yeah, I think mono piano sound good when done right but you don't hear that too much anymore.
To defend the engineers though, once you've been asked to "hard pan" the toms for the 20th time you kinda give up (I still try to sneak 'em in tighter sometimes).

[jajjguy]

People who study and design concert halls think and talk a lot about "auditory source width," which means how wide the music sounds when you're in the hall listening to a live performance. Imagine you're at an orchestra concert. If you close your eyes and spread your arms apart to represent how wide the music sounds, it'll be much wider than your eyes see the orchestra. Like, hundreds rather than tens of feet. This has mostly to do with reflections from the side walls, and it's considered quite desirable.

In other words, "realism" in sound has always been somewhat negotiable, and people have always wanted the music to sound bigger, and especially wider, than it really is. So I see nothing wrong with trying to create similar illusions with recorded music.

(That said, I think hard panning of close mics usually sounds boring... it's more complicated than that.)

[bnath]

Originally posted by hethaerto
I always figured the reason for panning piano and drums so wide was to hopefully engage the listener's fantasy of playing the intruments himself.

This is why I tend to pan drums from the drummer's perspective, rather than from the audience's. I'm not even a drummer, but for whatever reason it is generally more satisfying to me and the drummers playing. I also surmised that most layfolks who listen to music casually, and from the audience perspective, wouldn't really discern much a difference, whereas musicians would and do...

Originally posted by James Lehmann
Why do some engineers go in for this artificial panning trick, especially on a Jazz recording?

While I appreciate the art of documentary recording and reproducing live events, I also believe that there is much more to the art of recording than what is essentially the equivalent of photorealistic painting. I don't see why all recordings need to be a veritable reflection of realistic situation. I think it's fair to say that fantasy and the hyperreal are both ubiquitous and meritable qualities of art in general.

Personally, I tend to prefer recordings that transcend reality in some way or another. Though, I realise it's not at all black or white; on the flip side, there are plenty of times that I find myself yearning for modern recordings to minimise the amount of processed manipulation and leverage elements of a more utilitarian aesthetic (where appropriate!).

b :*

[max cooper]

Unless you are picking up the whole band with two mics, your mix is all illusion anyway.

This is, of course, the main thing.

But even if you're picking up the band with two mics, their relationship with each other and the source will determine how "big" stuff is in the mix to a degree

What is "correct" mic pair spacing, ear width?

I think the issue is "does it work"? Is it convincing considering the application?

I'm not sure stereo was an improvement in the first place.

[kevinc]

You know the whole the thing about Jazz musicians is they`re supposed to be good. A lot of them go to school and practice their asses off as opposed to a lot of the rock musicians around these days.

Throw up 1 overhead mic on drums and you`ve got the drum sound.

Maybe a couple more close mics on the soloists and one near the bass and your done.

The (band which should be kick ass if it actually is Jazz) should take care of their own level and sound. You shouldn`t even need to compress or EQ anything if the room is good and they are actually worth a shit as "Jazz" musicians.

If I was working with quality musicians that knew how to play together I`d go for the most natural sound possible to bring out the fact they indeed sound good on their own. Why **** around with something that isn`t broken ? Why would you have to throw a bunch of engineering tricks at a band that`s first and foremost trying to showcase the skill of the players ?

I think we should be trying to capture what`s really going on in the room as accurately as possible and throwing ten mics on a kit and panning everything in weird directions isn`t a very natural sound.

The whole panning things from the drummers perspective can be a neat effect but who the hell other than the drummer actually hears it that way when standing in a room with a band playing ? Why would you mix an album according to the way the drummer hears things in the room when nobody else hears it that way ?

I do lots of panning myself but it`s usually because I`m trying to fit a whole lot of midrange sounds together and have them all be heard without it sounding like a bunch of mud.

Drums are pretty much straight up the middle for me in any genre unless I`m doing something weird like trying to offset the cabasa which is panned 3:00 right with a hi hat panned 9:00 left so you can hear them both.

Of course everybody here can do whatever the hell they want but I just figure for halfway decent Jazz you`d want to keep the engineering as neutral as possible. If the band and room were good enough I`d even just do the whole thing in mono.

Obviously if it`s the type of Jazz that sounds more like instrumental rock I`m not really saying anything here. In that case go ahead and mix it like a rock album.

[fifthcircle]

Personally, this whole bit about panning from player's prospective on a JAZZ album bugs the hell out of me. Remember a jazz recording is almost always capturing a single performance/event that is enjoyed by an audience. Jazz recordings rarely use overdubs and the whole listening concept to jazz is very different than popular music. This is why I do everything from audience prospective. This means drums AND piano (piano hi on the far left)... As I mentioned before, I also don't really like the wide-panned piano and drum sound anyways and this helps hold everything together.

--Ben

[AdAudioInc]

So just like any topic here we've run the whole spectrum, from people that hate it - to people that use it but think it's wrong, to people that like it.

I think the focus is a little too much on the engineering - I have a question, are the freaking songs any good? Do you like listening to them?

Yeah, bad engineering can kill a song, but if I like a song - I don't give a red rats ass, where the hi hat is.

[hollywood_steve]

Yeah, bad engineering can kill a song, but if I like a song - I don't give a red rats ass, where the hi hat is.

But that's part of the point that a few of us are trying to make: it can be difficult to appreciate the song if you are constantly distracted by "stupid engineering tricks". A realistic snapshot of a live performance allows the song to "star" instead of the listener focussing on tom fills that swirl around his head.

And this whole concept of the "creative" aspect of engineering gets discussed in endless threads every couple of months. The thing that I always remember is that every time that the focus is placed on creative studio production, there is usually a large scale backlash against "overproduction" as the movement heads back towards simple three minute songs recorded "live" as a refreshing alternative to "noodling" around in the studio. It has happened every decade since I've been alive, starting with the late 60's abandonment of studio excess in favor of straightforward RnR.

I'm all for placing the songs up on a pedestal above everything else, and the best way to do that is to not obscure the songs with overproduction or engineering tricks.

Just my opinion....

[David R.]

Love this thread. I have been guilty of panning the drums, and piano, and whatever in the same song.

Here you are, spending all this time getting the best drum sound you can (sorry, I am not going to 'throw up" one mic for the drums). It can be 3 mics or 10. You have two overheads, of course you are going to pan them left and right while getting the drum mix. Sounds puuurrrrty. And that piano - the subtle shift from left to right as the player goes up the scales. Here you are sitting in the middle of the monitors with a grin.

Then everything gets ruined when you squish the the drums together, the tom fills just sit there instead of dancing around your headphones. Piano, why did I spend so much time stereo mic'ing it?

Well, I learned my lesson when I tracked a piano for someone. I got a beautiful stereo sound. Thought it would be featured. It ended up on the left side, where it needed to be, down in the mix, and sounded great there.

The engineer (myself) loves the stereo sound. It's like showing off. Problem is the song/mix might not need it.

That's my 2c.

[Joe Ferla]

You know guys making studio recordings is really much different from the real thing....live music being played. We use isolation booths, each musician has a headphone mixer with his own mix (no one is listening to the same mix but they are playing together!) It's amazing they can play well together without hearing the same mix, but anyway.........
Back to the case in point.......panning.
To me a record (CD) is surreal. If you really were to try and capture what a band sounds like live you would probably just make a mono record. But we do have stereo, why not use it. I try to engage the listener any way I can. Drama. When a drum set is panned wide you actually hear more of what the drummer is doing and get more of what his intention was. When he hits a tom it's an accent or an effect...on a CD why not have it really mean something, move the listener, engage him. I think we need to almost (with taste) overdo certain things on recordings to compensate for the fact that we are not there in the moment....remember we can't see the expression on the musician's face. Clarity is another factor. Panning helps with that big time. Sometimes drastic panning will allow you to hear everything in the arrangement....which is what an engineer's job is, to be able to allow the listener to hear everything that's being played in proper perspective. A great sounding recording with wide panning done tastefully enhances the music. It doesn't take away unless it's not done properly. Try mixing a tune that has upright bass, a drum pattern that is being played with mallets on mostly toms, and low percussion hand drums without some hard panning. If you can make all of that speak in a mix without drastic panning please enlighten me. I've never been able to make that work without really using my panpots.
Sorry to go on and on about this but remember, it's all an illusion. When an excited musician comes into the control room and tells you it sounds just like him, congratulations.....you've just fooled him. Trust me, it doesn't sound just like him, it can't. Remember, SURREAL......it works every time.

Joe