I was listening to Van Halen I...

[53Crëw]

and had forgotten how differently everything was panned. The guitar is hard panned to the left, and the bass is panned about 30% to the right. Drums and vocals in the middle... It seems really out of balance after listening to much more symmetrical mixes. Everything seems so lopsided to the left.

 

[Jind]

I always liked the way all the early Van Halen albums were panned - it made isolating the guitar parts for transcribing/learning all the more easy. Instant -1 mixes for play along The intended audience was not listening to 90 percent of there music on earbuds so the panning was less obvious as well.

 

[AndrewB]

Try listening to a lot of the Beatles's stuff. A lot of the time they have ALL of the drums panned ALL the way to the left or right.

 

[53Crëw]

Some real early stereo stuff is panned pretty oddly. As I understand it, when stereo recordings first came to exist, early mixing consoles only had a switch for left or right, so you got situations where all the instruments would be in the right channel, and the singer would be in the left... Or as you mentioned, drums hard left or right.. Things like that. It took a little while before they developed the idea of a pan pot to place the instrument somewhere between the left and right speaker.

 

[NoSoup4you22]

That shit drives me nuts. Rather listen to it in mono than have all the guitars on one side.

 

[Jevil]

Listen to old Uriah Heep stuff... some songs have vocals 80% panned to one side. It is weird when you hear it with headphones.

 

[professorlamp]

loads of jazz stuff is the same, guitar and other lead instrument (sax,whatever...) panned hard left and drums and keyboard hard right. It's nice to hear what the soloist is playing but it's wayyy too distracting for me

 

[Mattayus]

I can't remember the name of the band, but a friend showed me something the other day where the guitars/vox were down the middle, but it had two drum tracks, one hard left and one hard right. It was fucked up, but in a bizarre way didn't sound all that stupid

 

[Mattayus]

^ Found it

 

[DeclanWhite]

fuck that haha

 

[Shinozoku]

Dude, they have two drummers.

That's kinda insane.

 

[53Crëw]

^ Found it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMnTQE68Xts

Trippy. At least it's balanced, but you can definitely hear that it's two drummers.