How panning of stereo tracks works - Did you know you only shrink the stereo field?

[Boray]

I just made some tests to determine how the VS mixer works on panning stereo tracks. I thought it was a combination of changing the "sub" left and right mono tracks volumes and pannoration, but it isn't!!! All it does is to pannorate the two L and R mono tracks. If you pan a stereo track to L63, then both L and R tracks are panned to L63. If you pan a stereo track to L32, then L track is panned to L63 and R track is panned to L1, etc. So what you are doing when panning a stereo track is just to make its stereo field more narrow and to move it.

I have allways used panning of stereo tracks to "center" stereo recordings, without realizing that this narrows the stereo field. Hmmmm.... Not good at all! No wonder some of my drum overheads sound a bit mono-ish... So if you want to center a stereo recording (to make up for input trim knobs or whatever) - without making the stereo field more narrow, then you have to change the volume of the left and right sub-tracks instead. On a stereo track, you do this by moving the "cursor" to the fader setting. Press PRM.V (F6). Here you can change left and right sub volumes.

I know this discovery will improve my mixes, I hope it will improve yours too!!!

/Anders

[Boray]

Btw, this is how I did the test: I took two completely different mono tracks (one bass and one guitar). I copied these to two new tracks that I then linked to a stereo track. I put everything at the same levels and turned off EQ etc. I put the two mono tracks at pan L63 and R63, the stereo track to pan 0. Then I phase inverted the stereo track = total silence. Then I just moved the pan of the stereo track to some other value (sound came again) and then moved the pans of the mono tracks to make it completely silent again. It wasn't harder than that...

/Anders

[Boray]

I noticed that you don't need to press F6 to get to the parameter values, you can just press "Yes" when standing on the fader value to get to the L and R sub volumes. Great to learn something new once in a while!

/Anders