Quote:
Originally Posted by SprintBob
I'm not sure I understand the difference when I have two mics recorded on two mono tracks of panning "inward" or "outward". My pan control knob for each track lets me pan left or right 0% (centered) to 100%. How do I know I am panning inward or outward relative to one or both tracks?
My DAW (Reaper) does the same as what Doug mentions in panning a stereo track with two mics recorded on it.
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I think this is a source of some confusion. Some people are talking about "panning inward" - making a stereo pair sound narrower. Every DAW's different, but usually you can do that when you record to two mono tracks. You have a choice of how much of mic 1 appears in the left vs right and the same with mic #2. So you could even set both pan controls to the center (equal in each channel) and get mono.Or you could pan one mic slightly left and the other slightly right, and get a narrow stereo sound. Or hard left and right to get the widest sound.
On DAWs I'm familiar with, when you record to a stereo track, the "pan" control simply adjusts the volume of one side or the other, it doesn't make the stereo image narrower or wider, it just shifts it left or right.
So I think people are talking about two different things.
For recording to stereo tracks, I try to balance the mic levels from the beginning, but if I need to adjust them slightly during mix down, the pan/balance control is one way to do it.