Panning the LOGIC Pan (as in don’t use it)

This may be old news for many, but it was a bit of a revelation for me so let me share it.

Logic’s channel strip pan is a bit of a funny beast. Instead of actually panning the signal from one side to the other, it lowers the volume of one side to create the impression of panning. The problem with this is that you start to lose the imaging information of the channel you are panning away from. So at full pan left for instance, you lose any info from the right side. For example, if you are working with an orchestral recording of a string section of 14 players, the players may be distributed 5R, 1C, 8L. So with the default LOGIC panner at full pan left, you are actually only hearing part of the one player in the center (1C), and the eight players on the left (8L). All of the players on the right (5R) have disappeared. Your 14 piece string section is now reduced to 8.5 instruments in effect.

This obviously isn’t what happens in real life. If those 14 players were to get up and move to the left side of the stage, you would still hear 14 string players. And even though they are all sitting on the left, it is likely not the EXTREME left and you’d still have some right channel info.

In other DAWs, the default behavior is to increasingly fold the channel information from one side into the other as you pan from one side to the other. That way you still have both channels of information, but the pan setting better represents the positioning in space. (I imagine at extremes these two signals sum to a true mono so if you have phase problems, you’ll find out pretty quickly.)

Fortunately in LOGIC there is an answer. It’s a plug-in called the “Direction Mixer”. You can use this plugin to decode middle and side audio recordings or to spread the stereo base of a left/right recording and set the pan position.

The thing has three buttons:

Input: Click LR for a standard left/right signal or MS for a middle and side encoded signal
Spread: For LR signals this widens or narrows the apparent sterero field (all the way to mono if desired). So at a value of ’1′, the left is on the left and the right is on the right. As you decrease the value, the two sides move toward the center. At ‘O’ it is a summed mono signal. For MS signals it sets the level of the side signal. Values higher than ’1′ raise the level of the side signal. At a value of ’2′ you hear only the side signal.
Direction: Determines the pan position for the middle of the stereo field. At ’0′ the midpoint is perfectly centered. For LR signals values of ’90′ or ‘-90′ pan the signal hard left or right. Over those values begins to move the signal back to the center, but the left and right info is swapped. For MS signals values of ’90′ or ‘-90′ pan the middle signal hard left or right and higher values move the middle signal back towards the center while swapping the sides.

Much easier to use in practice than it reads,  and the overhead is negligible so I’ve started putting these on my channels as the last plugin by default. Give it a try and see what you think. It’s subtle, but it does make a difference.

There is also one other issue about panning you should be aware involving the Pan Law that you use in your song settings. A good description can be found here.

(Special thanks to Hetoreyn’s VSL podcasts for helping to crystalize the random bits of info I had heard over the years on this issue.)

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