Panning with a mono sound?

Share your favorite Ableton Live tips, tricks, and techniques.
Post Reply
Fishticky
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2006 12:31 am

Panning with a mono sound?

Post by Fishticky » Mon Jul 14, 2008 3:47 pm

Hey,

I know this seems like a simple question, but I am a fairly proficient user in Ableton Live, and I have not been able to figure this out for the life of me.

Suppose I have a mono file, and I want to pan it left and right myself. How would I go about doing this? I know there is a pan slider on each track, but moving it left to right doesn't seem to change anything (master just puts it in the left channel regardless of the panning on the mono track)

Also, if I have a return track, and want it to output audio only to a single master track , how would I do this (this is one of the things I tried to emulate stereo, I made two return tracks, one which represented right, and one that represented left. When I send these return tracks to master, I can't figure out how to make them output to a single channel in master either)

Help would be greatly appreciated.

-Thanks

Fishticky
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2006 12:31 am

Post by Fishticky » Mon Jul 14, 2008 3:48 pm

Sorry about the double post. I would delete one if I could...

laird
Posts: 1996
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 10:05 pm
Location: PDX
Contact:

Post by laird » Mon Jul 14, 2008 4:11 pm

Huh? I am supposing you don't actually have a true mono file, here.

Maybe post a screenshot?



Here's what you should do:

1. Arm a track for recording, select under input "Input 1", not "input 1/2"

(you maybe need to go into prefernces/audio to enable mono recording.

2. record a mono file. It should only have 1 track, not 2 (1 audio + 1 empty).

3. turn the pan knob.


that will work.

If you have recorded a sound into just the left-channel of a stereo file, you can still pan it easily.
Just add a Utility plugin and set it to Left-only.

Now the pan pot should work just fine.


lastly, you can aslo use Utility plugins on return channels if you want the return channel to be panned hard left or hard right.

laird
Posts: 1996
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 10:05 pm
Location: PDX
Contact:

Post by laird » Mon Jul 14, 2008 4:14 pm

panning a stereo track, of course, simply turns down the left channel or the right channel.

whereas panning a mono file should sent it to the left channel or the right channel.

Thus, if you have a stereo file that is only recorded on the right-side, you can't pan it (without using Utility to convert it to mono, first)

Fishticky
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2006 12:31 am

Post by Fishticky » Mon Jul 14, 2008 4:22 pm

Oh I get it. You were right, these were files originally recorded in stereo. My problem was that I was adding the 'mono' utility to these tracks, hoping it would do what you showed me adding the 'left' utility does.

It all works now.

-Thanks

Post Reply