Dazed about panning and stereo width...help newbie

[Valentino]

Hello all wonderful people here.

I am going through a nightmare trying to produce a dance track, originally done in Reason rewired into ProTools for mixing.

After getting the balance and compression roughly right with all my tracks, my next step was to sort out the reverb and panning (I can only take things one step at a time, otherwise it gets all too much for me )

Anyway. A lot of the tracks from Reason are rewired into ProTools as stereo tracks because I am using certain devices in Reason which have stereo out, such as delays and filters. So I have ended up in ProTools with all my tracks as steeo, except for the bassline which comes in from Reason in mono (because I have applied no effects to this).

So, my problem is that in ProTools, I have each stereo track hard panned left and right for the respective channels. When I try to position the track in my '3D field' I am getting a bit confused as to what I should be doing with the left and right pans. Should I just set them both to the same setting so that they line up above each other, and then adjust them left and right this way, or what? The problem with this is that it causes the sound to change in the stereo field. I believe this is because the stereo width diminishes by setting the left and right pans to the same position.

Can anyone offer me some advice or simple steps on technique of how best one should handle this.

What the hell is this phenomena called 'stereo width' anyway? Does anyone here have a simple analogy or something which can help me understand this. I know what it is, but am not sure how it relates in the real world.

Please help this newbie.
Thanks.
Val

[Chris Cavell]

Do you have the waves imager or S1 shuffler?

[Valentino]

No, what is that?

[lemix]

Valentino,

What the hell is this phenomena called 'stereo width' anyway? Does anyone here have a simple analogy or something which can help me understand this. I know what it is, but am not sure how it relates in the real world.

I'll try in my "foreigner" style (that's all Ive got.. )
12'o clock on the face of a clock is mono. 10 and 2 would be "very narrow" stereo. As you go further apart the "width" opens up. 5'o clock and 7'o clock represents full or wide stereo.

there...
happy tooling,

[Chris Cavell]

It's a waves plugin that if you "gang' two of the controls together will allow you to "pan" a stereo source very easily and intuitively.

[Valentino]

lemix, Thanks for that, but I'm none the wiser

Chris, That sounds like what I need, I'll have a look into that. You understand my problem?

[lemix]

lemix, Thanks for that, but I'm none the wiser

OK...[in shouting voice with heavy European accent] What do you want from me ?!
Each of the pan sliders on your stereo mixer channel represent one of the "clock" hands.

cheers,

[Chris Cavell]

Demo's and documents for the Waves S1 tools are available at their site: www.waves.com .

[Valentino]

Yes, I know all that. but I don't understand how you should determine the width for each track. Most of the tracks in my session are actually really mono, but they have come in stereo, and I want to know how I should interpret them. In Reason, all the stereo tracks have a single pan control from left to right. So I want to know, what does the Reason mixer do when you move the pan left and right. It somehow deals with all this stereo width stuff, but has just a single knob.

ALIGHT (Also in loud shouting voice in another heavy European accent)

Cheers

[Chris Cavell]

Mono tracks have zero 'width'. The pan control determines how much of the signal goes to each side of the bus. Fully panned left sends 100% of the signal to the left speaker, and similarly when panned right. Straight up sends 50% to the left speaker and 50% to the right. (I have disregarded something called "pan-law" which often varies slightly from daw to daw, board to board, in this response for simplicity's sake.)

I'm not sure about the reason stereo mixer panning stereo sources with a single pan knob, but I imagine that the single knob can be though of as a dual volume control and that the actual left and right side of the source signal are always hard panned left and right. Panning to the left would be equivalent to having two faders, one for the left source, and one for the right, where the right one is turned down all the way.