Yeah, It really is confusing.. but not impossible! I dont give up too easy but I do take alot of brakes. And since I started recording with reel 2 reel I've learned a whole lot, not everything, but more than Ive ever know. What really throws me off is stereo. I still dont quite understand it. You see I have my 4 busses panned at 12:00 (which the sound is equal on both sides). What I dont get is... If I do a stereo bounce, all the information gets put on 2 tracks, lets say Buss 1, and 2. Now if I leave the pan settings at 12:00 will it still be stereo?
....I dont really know how to explain myself well with this kinda stuff.
If you leave your pan controls at the 12:00 position, you're effectively just making a mono presentation of the sound. So, making a bounce of that mono sound is a waste of track space to copy that over to 2 tracks on the next machine. Therefore, don't do that!!!
Your pan controls are there for a reason, so let's get a handle on what that reason is and learn how to use the function to its full advantage. The reason they're there is to allow you to create and overall stereo soundfeild presentation of the sound. If you think back to some of the early recordings from the early 1960's, (The Beatles in particular), you can find recordings where the drums are only in the left or only in the right channel and the vocal might only be on the right channel and other instruments were placed in both speakers. This is a classic example of a new toy being in the hands of engineers who didn't know what to do with this new-found power and used the panning feature stupidly.
The whole idea of panning instruments left to right or anywhere in-between, is to try to create a realistic presentation of how a live band or orchestra might sound if you went to see them live on stage. And to date, trying to pan instruments in a way that mimics that live presentation is mankind's best idea so far when it comes to panning an instrument. So think about how a live band might sound and use that as your working guide for how you might pan various instruments left to right and how the reverb effect of that sound bouncing off the walls and ceiling of the hall they're playing in would factor into that when you apply a reverb effect to that part.
If you keep on your current path of putting all the pan controls at 12:00, you're in essence just making a mono, (center stage) presentation of the sound and you're effectively not making much or any of a stereo presentation by doing this.
So, if we go back to your specific recording project, If you have a stereo drum machine, you should record it with the pan controls hard left and hard right to fully preserve what ever panning information was there originally. The bass guitar panned to center and the rhythm guitar panned just left or just right of center and then transfer that stereo presentation to the next machine on two tracks to preserve that panning information. Then, once the that transfer is complete, you then leave those two tracks panned hard left and hard right to preserve that stereo mix. Then the next added parts, say the lead guitar and main vocal, you then pan according to the stereo presentation you want to build on. So that means panning the lead guitar in the opposite channel to where the rhythm guitar is sitting and the main vocal where that needs to be in relation to the backing vocals that will be added after the next bounce.
The idea of all this panning is so that you end up roughly simulating the "live on stage" music sound, where the players and their parts are spread out across the stage.
Hopefully, after you've absorbed what I wrote, you'll get a better idea of how to use the panning more effectively.
Cheers!
