Pan effects without panning Send channel?

[noahbird]

Hi Folks,

I'm trying to setup an audio track (let's say vocals) so that the reverb is panned along with it. I don't want to pan the send channel itself because I want to be able to send multiple audio tracks to the reverb send and have the reverb panned for them to the appropriate place based on where each audio track is panned. I have a track with the audio on it and a Send with the Reverb on it. I've tried using the Utility plugin and playing with the panorama and width sliders, the mixer's pan knob and setting 'Stereo' on the reverb to 0. Basically, no matter what I do and no matter how move the audio across the pan field (using the above mentioned variables), the reverb is always in panned in the center. There must be a way to do this. Any ideas?

Thanks

[noahbird]

Protools has a pan on the effects send, Live doesn't. I'm able to mimic old consoles that didn't have stereo sends by doing the following:

- Create 2 Sends, One with Reverb panned hard left, another with a copy of the same reverb (i.e. the same settings) panned hard left.
- Use two sends on the audio track and adjust the amount of the send of each to send different amounts to the left and right reverb, thereby achieving the same effect.

It works but it sucks. Now I have to use two sends for every effect that I need to pan and I have to automate everything in sync.

Anyone have a better solution? I'll be submitting a feature request for the send's pan

[DJMillsy]

Probably not what you want to hear but the only solution will be to use the reverb as an insert effect on each channel. That way you will be accurately placing both the dry and wet signal with the track pan.

Its a processor hog but you can always freeze the tracks if things start to get to much.

[geo]

Protools has a pan on the effects send, Live doesn't. I'm able to mimic old consoles that didn't have stereo sends by doing the following:

- Create 2 Sends, One with Reverb panned hard left, another with a copy of the same reverb (i.e. the same settings) panned hard left.
- Use two sends on the audio track and adjust the amount of the send of each to send different amounts to the left and right reverb, thereby achieving the same effect.

It works but it sucks. Now I have to use two sends for every effect that I need to pan and I have to automate everything in sync.

Anyone have a better solution? I'll be submitting a feature request for the send's pan

I can suggest a solution for you. Create an effects rack in your return track with 2 chains containing the same reverb with 100% wet signal. On the first chain, add a utility plugin after the reverb setting mode to "Left" and Panorama to "50L" basically panning in to the left. On the second chain, add a utility plugin after the reverb setting mode to "Right" and Panorama to "50R" basically panning in to right. Click the "Chain" button to get into the Chain Selector editor. Drag the first chain's zone to the right to cover the range from 0 - 126. For the second chain, you position the zone range between 1 - 127. Select the right fade handler of the first chain and drag it all the way to the left. Do the same for the second chain but drag the left fade handler to the right. Right click the chain selector ruler and map it to Macro 1. Now, Macro 1 is your panning control for the send reverb. You can add additional left/right gain independently by adjusting the gain control on the 2 utility plugins.
If I am not mistaken it achieves the same effect but using one send.
I have included a project with these setting, just drop a wave file on the Audio channel and open the send. You can find the file here.
.

[Tone Deft]

it would be cool if you could put this up on the features request forum.

interesting idea. never been a Pro Tools user myself.

[noahbird]

I've posted it to the feature request forum

Geo: Thanks for the suggestion, I'd already tried something similar with a rack but I'd only gotten so far as having two chains, both with reverb and a utility on each setting it to 'right' and 'left' and a macro mapping to control the pan but I realized, that put me exactly where I'd started at. You see, with 'our' solution, you still have to set the pan on the return track itself (and even with out the complicated chain, the behavior is exactly the same).

Try this:
- Send a mono audio track (or forced to mono with a utility plugin) to your reverb chain.
- Set the audio track to 'sends only' so you can only hear the reverb.
- Pan the audio track

Expected results: the Reverb moves along with the pan
Actual restuls: The reverb is always panned in the center.

Now try this:

- Create a new Return track and add a Simple Delay to it
- Link the Delay so there's only one delay happening.
- Set the Wet/Dry to 100% and feedback to whatever
- Turn of the audio track's send to your reverb and turn up the send to the Delay Return
- Pan your audio track

Expected AND Actual results: The delay effect moves across the pan field according to the audio track's pan position. It works the same was with Chorus, Auto Filter and all the other effects I tested.

So there's something "special" about the Reverb where this doesn't work, maybe it's a bug. (I should post the problem in this forum too, to see what they say). In the end though, I'd like control over my Return's pan so that I have a choice of where the Return sits in comparison to the audio track. For example, I might want to have my dry sound panned left and my reverb panned right. Until something changes in Live though, my original workaround in the second post of this tread, of creating 2 Return tracks will work. It kinda sucks since there's only 12 Returns and if I'm doing heavy mixing I can max that out easily (a couple 5-point spreads will do that in no time).

The more my mixing skills increase though, the more I'm tempted to use Live as a composition/performance tool and save my mixing for ProTools

[Tone Deft]

^ nice post.

maybe this will shed some light.

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?p=503462#p503462

A comment in regards of the "mono reverb" discussion:

Yes, it is correct that the input of the reverb simply sums up the left and right channel. But this does not imply that the output is mono as well.
A lot of reverb algorithms basically take a mono input signal, use a series of allpass filters to create the first reflections and a feedback diffusion network for the actual reverb tail. Allready the first reflections are individually panned to create the impression of more or less realistic room geometries and individually filtered as a function of distance (time) and level. These panned reflections are in a second stage feed into a true stereo FDN and this is what comes out. A "mono" reverb would output a single channel of reverb. Using a true stereo input would make sense for more realistic room simulations but also would increase CPU load significantly and the improvement on most sources is not very big. The reverb was build for Live 1.5 in 2001. At this time CPU was a big concern and we decided to go for the quite common mono -> stereo approach.

A totaly different issue is the bug that the stereo width control affected the stereo width of the dry part of the input signal. This bug has been solved for Live 6.

Since the best way to achive realistic room simmulations nowaday is convolution and not other method even comes close if you want to have realistic reverbs we decided not to put much effort into making the Live reverb sound extremly naturalistic. We focused on achving a dense and pleasing reverb tail and the capability of creating interesting reverb sounds with it. However, at some point we might either add a new reverb or significantly improve the existing one.

Some ideas how to make more out of the exisiting reverb:

1. The default setting of the Spin parameter is not perfect. More realistic reverbs can be achived by placing the ball in the spin 2D view closer to the left bottom.

2. to build a true stereo reverb with two independent inputs use a rack with two chains of the reverb, place a utility before each reverb and set one to "left" input and the other one to "right". Place a second utility after the reverb and pan one to the left and the other to the right. Finally add an EQ 8 sfter the reverb, set it to MS mode and EQ the mid and side bands differently and you'll get a complete new reverb experience.

3. also consider filtering of the reverb by placing an EQ before it or putting two reverbs in series, where the frist one is set to produce a very small and short room while the second one makes a big room with a long reverb tail.

There are many ways to achive very unique and fresh sounding reverbs even with the old Live 1.5 reverb, just experiment a bit.

And if you want a convincing concert hall, Alitverb would be my first choice too.

Robert

[geo]

Until something changes in Live though, my original workaround in the second post of this tread, of creating 2 Return tracks will work. It kinda sucks since there's only 12 Returns and if I'm doing heavy mixing I can max that out easily (a couple 5-point spreads will do that in no time).

Isn't what I suggested the same like what you are doing now but using one send? Cause with your solution, you still need to control the audio channel pan and the return pan independently.

[geo]

2. to build a true stereo reverb with two independent inputs use a rack with two chains of the reverb, place a utility before each reverb and set one to "left" input and the other one to "right". Place a second utility after the reverb and pan one to the left and the other to the right. Finally add an EQ 8 sfter the reverb, set it to MS mode and EQ the mid and side bands differently and you'll get a complete new reverb experience.

3. also consider filtering of the reverb by placing an EQ before it or putting two reverbs in series, where the frist one is set to produce a very small and short room while the second one makes a big room with a long reverb tail.

Have you tried that? I think, that's what you want.

[noahbird]

Geo: I downloaded and tried your send-pan file but unless I'm misunderstanding something, panning my mono, audio track doesn't pan the reverb send along with it.

The good news is that Henke's true-stereo reverb totally works!!!!! If I set my audio (mono) to 'sends only) and then pan the audio track, the reverb correctly pans along with it!

Thanks everyone for your help!

[refuuj]

I know this is a very old thread but I figured I'd still post my solution for panning a send for anyone else trying to figure out a good work around.

What I am doing is I create a new audio track, set the input to the that I want to send to a return and set the output to sends only. Set the monitor to "In"
Now this new track can be sent to whatever returns you want and the pan on the new track can be used to move its placement on the return tracks.

This along with Robert Henke's suggestions for more realistic reverb has done what I was looking to do plus more.

This method could also be used to pretreat the signal before hitting the return effects without affecting the sound of the return for other tracks you may want to send to it.