# Panning/Depth/Reverb - How to do it?



## holzlag0r (Jul 14, 2014)

Hello,
what is in your opinion the correct/best/smartest/... technique for panning/depth/reverb/general positioning?

Here is what I do:
- "Unpan" any pre-panned instruments to the middle, maybe increase/decrease stereo width so that I get it near "0" on the phase-meter (this has then 100% stereo width, right?)
- Pan them again with dualpan/powerpan/combined pan (whatever you want to call it)
- Send to a Group/FX channel [and Master Out as output channel]
- There are 3 Group channels: Front, Middle and Far. They have delays as inserts with 30m, 15m and 5m (distance to the back wall of the room)
- Sending the outputs of the group channels to a Convolution Reverb, mainly for ER and little tail
- Output is Master Out, but sending that stuff to another channel for Reverb Tail (conv. or alg. + highpass)

What is your way to do it?
Do you think that it is necessary to "unpan" prepanned instruments?

Thank you. /\~O


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## Soundmagic (Jul 17, 2014)

holzlag0r @ Mon Jul 14 said:


> Hello,
> what is in your opinion the correct/best/smartest/... technique for panning/depth/reverb/general positioning?
> 
> Here is what I do:
> ...



For the best result, I believe the key point is about 3 steps
1. You need to switch the stereo into M/S, then decrease the S, so the sound will tend to mono.
2. You need to have a really great reverb, not bluring the main sound, then added a bit this Reverb into the main sound.
3. Adjust volume if needed, but you should have a good result now.


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## clarkus (Jul 17, 2014)

"Un-pan pre-panned instruments"

"You need to switch the stereo into M/S, then decrease the S"

Sorry for my ignorance, but can you explain these steps just a bit?

I can understand (for example) that if an orchestra library has panned the basses to the right (orchestra position) you might want to place them center, but are you doing this sort of thing by ear? 

- Does M/S mean "Mono / Stereo," and - if so - how and why would I "decrease stereo." 

it sounds like you're advocating building into your mixing approach to put all the panning to zero but I am not sure how I would do that other than

a) using my ear and

b) making sure all panning knob were @ the 12:00 position, which is where they usually are to begin with.


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## re-peat (Jul 17, 2014)

clarkus @ Thu Jul 17 said:


> (...) Does M/S mean "Mono / Stereo," and - if so - how and why would I "decrease stereo. (...)


M/S means *mid/side*, not mono/stereo. Decreasing the side(s) does indeed monofy the signal ― obviously, since the mid, which is mono, becomes the more dominant presence ― but I’m not so sure if that is such a good idea when attempting to bring pre-panned instruments more center stage because, with this type of instruments/sections, there’s going to be a whole lot of pretty important information in that side signal, information which you definitely do *not* want to throw away.
In fact, the more an instrument is positioned to the side of the stage, and sampled as such, the more information that is essential for the definition and the character of the instrument, will be found in (one of) those side-channels (and much less so in the mid-portion of the M/S-signal).

Personally, I don’t like messing like this with samples ― because you not only damage the sound but also the spatial integrity of the samples/instruments ―, but if you really have to, I think better results can be achieved with a plugin that gives you independent control over the (stereo) position of the left and the right side of the stereo signal. And most decent stereo-tools can do this. It’s still far from ideal, and certainly not recommended practice for standard positioning of instruments, but at least you can move the relevant part of the source signal closer to the centre, if that’s what you want.

_


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## clarkus (Jul 17, 2014)

Thanks.

Not to be too blunt, can I assume I should ignore the advice offered up earlier on this thread?


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## SoundTravels (Jul 17, 2014)

I wouldn't ignore or accept any advice, because it's going to eventually come down to what you think sounds most convincing. So, really you'll need to try out the advice to see if you like it. 

I personally agree that leaving the samples alone will usually give you the most natural-sounding results. But, I've gone down a lot of different rabbit-holes, trying to get the positioning better, usually just to go back to square one. 

Instead of advice, I'll give you what I think are the problems with panning and M/S'ing VIs:

Regular panning, like the "pan" knob in Logic, simply turns down the amount of signal going into one stereo channel. So if your oboe is a little to the left, it will be a little hotter in the left channel. Now, to make it seem more "center" you can balance the level between the stereo channels by panning to the right and therefore turning down the L channel. The problem is (speaking only of wet or relatively wet samples that have some room sound) you then start hearing a room that doesn't make acoustic sense. The reflections on one side are louder than the other? It confuses the sense of the room, and muddies the realism.

Stereo pan. I use logic, and it doesn't have a built in stereo panner, which sucks, but there are some plugins you can use. flux has one but it's 32 bit only I think, and boz has one called panther. Anyhow, like re-peat said, that's a little better because you don't turn down and lose the information from one channel, it gets blended into the other channel. So say you're working with 8dio Adagio violins which are recorded all in a big semi-circle, instead of to the left like orchestral positioning (I wish they hadn't done that as it doesn't work for me at all...) You want to get your violins over to the left, so you use your stereo pan to move the R channel over to the L. Now you have the room reflections from one side of the room superimposed over the room reflections from the other side of the room. Very unnatural too. Muddy, confusing acoustically.

M/S. The M channel is everything that's shared between the two stereo channels (And S is anything that differs between the channels) so something that's recorded in mono is only M, because the L and R channel are identical. Something recorded in a washy room has a lot of S info as the sound is bouncing around the stereo field creating a lot of differences in the two stereo channels. So, in theory you could reduce the S info, resulting in a mono signal, and then pan that mono signal to wherever you want. Problem is, you have to then recreate some realistic sense of the S info. You've lost a lot of acoustic info, so you could try sending the M signal to a good convo reverb and try to recreate the sense of room with that (in the new position) but it's a bit like trying put Humpty Dumpty back together. 

Also, our ears are really good at pinpointing location, that's what they're originally there for, and that's why we have two so we can triangulate sounds of predators etc. When you take a recording that's in a reverberant space and make it mono, a funny thing happens. It goes WAY back into the distance. It's because the further away a sound is, the more mono it becomes. Like in a big concert hall, if you're right in front of the violins, you hear the reflections from the walls L and R very separate, but if you're way back in the nosebleeds the LR reflections have coalesced into a very mono-ish sound. So, take a Tree signal, but make it mono and it recreates this effect, and our mind thinks the sound is far away. Bummer. So if you remove the S, you'll push all of your instruments back a pretty good distance. 

Not sure if that helps, but thought I'd share in case it might! With VIs it's about acceptable losses. If you can accept any of the above losses because you gain something somewhere else, than I'd say go for it. If the losses are greater than the gains, go back to square one.

Best,

ST


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## clarkus (Jul 17, 2014)

Thanks for that very thorough post. Much appreciated. Great info & perspective.


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## The Darris (Aug 1, 2014)

Clarkus,

There are ways to stereo-ize pre positioned instruments. Spitfire's libraries, which are pre-positioned, have the built in transpose functionality which aids in this procedure. By using the transpose trick, you are doubling the size of the instrument but without phasing issues when you play them together. This is how you can take smaller sections and make larger ones. However, if you were to invert the stereo inverter in Kontakt (or use the built in stereo inverter in Logic) you can swap the Left and Right channels to 'invert' the stereo field of that instrument. Now, when you play your two instruments together (with one inverted) you have a full stereo image without phasing. 

Downside,

You are doubling the voice count of the instrument thus making it louder and you have to send the signal to another channel to do any additional panning, placement, or effects. It is a tedious setup but it works if you really want to get a pre-placed instrument set into a full equal balance stereo image.

I did this demo to not only show off the Spitfire Solo Violin playing a fast passage but also the stereo-ize trick: https://soundcloud.com/christopher-harris/sets/stereo-trick-sf-solo-violin/s-6Zgva


I hope this information is helpful.

Cheers,

Chris


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## holzlag0r (Aug 1, 2014)

Hello guys,
sorry - I thought that I enabled email notifications for this thread.

I have to try my approach again with a wet library - only did it with dry ones yet.
I can confirm that with dry libraries, your results are very realistic.

However, I can imagine that wet libraries don't work that well, because you would also move the whole room to the direction you are moving the instrument. Also any changes to the width of the reverb would not be that realistic

And thank you for the overview+advice @SoundTravels.  

@Chris:
Why can't you just use a vst to increase the stereo width of the solo violin. Also, if it is recorded at 12:00, doing the transpose trick + invert would not do a lot except doubling the violin, right?
Maybe I don't understand what you are trying to do. :D 

Thanks a lot
- The other Chris


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## Oliviawills (Aug 1, 2014)

Thanks 'Mr. clarkus'. I am fully agree with your answer. Thanks for sharing full details of it.


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## EastWest Lurker (Aug 1, 2014)

I must be missing something here. I thought most of the people here were obsessed with making it sound "real." If so, why would someone mess with the panning of a library that was recorded with the players in the position they actually sit at unless they are perhaps blending libraries by developers who had different ideas of how a concert stage or scoring stage is set up for the players?

Anyway, for depth the UAD Oceanway does a good job of working with that IMHO, although certainly tweaking the ERs of your verbs helps.

And Spat is also supposed to be useful for that, correct? I was given an NFR to test it but due to my mom's health problems I simply ran out of time to learn to use well enough that I could review it in a manner that would be fair to the developers.


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## rayinstirling (Aug 1, 2014)

@ Oliviawills

buysoundcloudlikes dot com ??????????


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## The Darris (Aug 1, 2014)

holzlag0r @ Fri Aug 01 said:


> @Chris:
> Why can't you just use a vst to increase the stereo width of the solo violin. Also, if it is recorded at 12:00, doing the transpose trick + invert would not do a lot except doubling the violin, right?
> Maybe I don't understand what you are trying to do. :D



You can't properly 'centralize' a pre-positioned recording. Libraries like Spitfire's don't record their instruments in mono or centralized and then pan them for us. They actually record them in stereo but with the instrument's in their normal positions on the stage. 

Cellos for instance, typically sit on the right side of center. Since they are recorded in stereo, this means we have two microphones (simply speaking), 1 for each channel (left/right) to pick up both the sound happening on the respected sides of the stage. If you listen to SF's Mural Cellos playing the Col Legno articulation with head phones and listen to just the right ear, you will hear the sharp attack of the back of the bow on the strings. However, if you listen to just the left ear, you will hear less of the attack and more of the tail. In fact, the left channel has a slight delay of a few ms because of the time it takes the direct sound of the Cellos to reach the microphone picking up the left stereo image. 

The use of stereo width will do nothing to this sound since it already has stereo width. Panning will only take away the full sound of the articulation so that leaves one option (that I am aware of) which is what I explained in my last post.

The idea is to create and EQUAL stereo image. Taking the cello, once more, we know that since it was recorded in position on the right side of the stage, how do we get it to the left side to equal out the stereo field. We invert the signal. To do this in Kontakt, you need to open a second Cello instrument and make sure it matches all microphone settings, volume, etc. Then, insert the inverter into the InsertEffects section and click "swap L/R." This effectively swaps the stereo field so that the cellos in that instrument sound like they are sitting on the left side of the stage. The downside though, is when you play back the the two instruments together, you get terrible phasing since they are triggering the same samples. To get around this you use the transpose trick and now you have a straight, equally balanced stereo image. To pan these two instruments left or right (equally) you need to send them to their own bus or group track (whatever you want to call it) and pan from there as you will have an equally balanced sound to play with. 

Again, I don't use this trick very often. It works nicely on pre-positioned instruments that I want to use in a solo context. In fact, Christian Henson recommended this technique to me with the SF Harp and it sounds amazing on that instrument. 

8dio, has spoken firmly on their techniques for NOT recording their instruments in position and this is one reason why, you can't control the position of the instrument unless you equally stereo-ize it. The only way I am aware of doing this properly so that you get the intended sound source is via a second instance of the instrument but inverted and transposed. I hope that makes more sense what I was trying to explain earlier. 

Cheers,

Chris


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## SoundTravels (Aug 1, 2014)

The Darris, maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but there's no need to "stereoize" a wet library, because they're all recorded in stereo already. If you're talking about changing the instruments position to the center so you can apply spatialization plugs etc, I don't think your technique will truly create a centralized image. A mono image is one where the L and R information match each other identically. If there is different information on L R channels that's how we locate where sounds are coming from. 

By taking a cello section and then superimposing another transposed and L/R flipped cello section on top, you're just going to get two sets of L/R channels, both with differing L and R info, so it will sound like a stage where there is a cello section sitting stage R and second cello section sitting stage L, not a central image of a cello section that you could pan, apply spatialization plugins, reverb, etc and have it sound like a single section sitting where you want them. However, this trick seems like it'd be good where you want a special effect, like Desplat's new Godzilla score where he had a L and a R horn section.

-ST


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## The Darris (Aug 1, 2014)

SoundTravels @ Fri Aug 01 said:


> The Darris, maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying........-ST



You aren't. The point I am trying to make is that you can't get a proper mono sound from a stereo recorded library in position. The only way you can attempt to get, at least, an equal left and right balance is through the technique I explained. I am well aware that it is essentially 'mocking' another section and doubling the voice count (re; my first explanation). 

This was merely a technique I got from Christian Henson of SF as a cool technique to use on the hard to get a solid stereo image. And sure enough, it sounds amazing like that. I would give it a try if you have the SF Harp. :D 

Cheers,

Chris


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## SoundTravels (Aug 1, 2014)

Got it! Yeah, I'll try that sometime for special effects like an all-cello string orch or double flutes or something! :D


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## Mahlon (Aug 1, 2014)

rayinstirling @ Fri Aug 01 said:


> @ Oliviawills
> 
> buysoundcloudlikes dot com ??????????



God. Now I've got retinal damage.

Mahlon


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