How to record a hardcore band

[Sinai Beach]

Can anyone tell me how i should pan the instruments in a 5 piece hardcore band? there's a drummer,bassist, lead guitarist, rhythm guitarist and singer. I was wondering which side to put the instruments, left, right or both.

[.Hypocrisy Hater]

Experiment.

[KKKKKocaine]

Experiment.

Yup, Just fiddle and see what seems right.
However as a general rule, drums and vocals almost always stay centred.

[airborne50caliber]

bass tends to nearly always go in the middle, and if your snare and kick don't it won't work very well. So Bass, snare, kick all centerstage.

You gotta experiment with how you want to pan your guitars - I record some hardcore and I have my lead guitar hard left and my rythm somewhere between hard right and centerstage. I take a tiny bitta reverb from the lead guitar and put it hard right. But you gotta experiment.

vocals usually go centerstage for the dry signal, but if you wanna put some wet on the left etc it still works given you have something powerful on the right like lead guitar's reverb or rythm guitar.

As for the rest of the drum kit, it can be panned either for the player's point of view (Hihat left, ride on the right, tom 1 left, tom 2 slightly right, tom 3 hard right etc) or the audience point of view. Some people prefer to pan every surface on the drumkit centerstage but it tends to mix the sounds too much and it ends up sounding like a drum machine.

these are just guidelines as how beginners usually start - go ahead and experiment from there.

[Moseph]

also keep in mind that in most hard rock the drums are made to be way up front in the mix, much louder in the recording than if you were to actually hear them live. Lots of first-timers assume vocals and guitar should blow the rest of the band away, when in fact you want drums up front and vocals cutting clearly through the whole mix w/o overpowering everything.