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Hello friends!After a long time spent lying low just making my music and lurking around when I have questions, I've finally decided to make an account here so that I can pick your brains about something I'm struggling with.
I have an ERA II Hurdy Gurdy line (thanks Eduardo, it sounds lovely) in a project I'm working on and, somewhere along the line, I noticed that it sounds much better when panned through the plugin UI's pan knob rather than that in my DAW.
Naturally, this has caused some issues for me, since it's much more labor-intensive to pan this way than with the DAW. This is especially so because I have to use a lot of subprojects to keep the CPU happy with the complexity of what I'm trying to work on.
I decided to run a null test to make sure that my ears weren't deceiving me, so I did the following.
- Spun up a new project
- Copied in the track in question (exactly as-is in the main project). It's worth noting that I'm using a single stereo layer for ERA II and setting its pan knob hard-left and its reverb completely off. There is no DAW pan set for this track, nor are there any other effects.
- Duplicated the aforementioned track, but set the ERA II pan knob to center.
- Rendered both tracks to stereo audio. Naturally, the original showed only the left channel when rendered and the duplicate showed both channels as expected.
- Panned the duplicate track hard-left (stereo balance) in the DAW and inverted the phase.
- Astonishment and confusion.
The effect remained no matter how I split the channels, messed with pan types or laws, or anything I could think of. I tried cutting the rendered stereo tracks down to mono-left and then matching the panning. I tried going between every combination of stereo balance, stereo pan, and dual pan, each with several different pan laws. I even retried the whole null test on identical tracks, just to rule out something weird with my DAW or setup. The effect remained.
So anyway — have any of you ever experienced something like this? Am I missing something here, or is there something I should know? Is there an easier way to do this without sacrificing the sound?
Best wishes
– Nick
Some helpful materials:
Rendered tracks:
Panned via ERA II: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jNBrwU ... sp=sharing (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jNBrwU2G61141InPEFzJqT1H5v94qpHt/view?usp=sharing)
No Panning (Later panned with DAW): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Fhw1Tx ... sp=sharing (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Fhw1Tx0Ouo9BSzb37wDkhiyF2iv_DfZ9/view?usp=sharing)
Rendered result of the problem:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hZuCuR ... sp=sharing (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hZuCuRD-PySnURLuDS55q1jz1W-eRN29/view?usp=sharing)
ERA II Settings:
Main:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lrZiO4 ... sp=sharing (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lrZiO4ODV-B49EzYrmyXTC-TLt_8X0JZ/view?usp=sharing)
Controls:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19TWdHE ... sp=sharing (https://drive.google.com/file/d/19TWdHE3ZXfu-77LhBm7BG3QDBdcSRSwy/view?usp=sharing)
Rig Specs:
Computer: 2017 Macbook Pro, macOS 12.5.1, 16GB RAM, Intel Core i7 3.5GHz
VST: ERA II running on Engine 2.8.0.58
DAW: Reaper v6.66
Interface: Presonus FireStudio
Interesting update:
I repeated the above null test with Accordions 2 (Concertina) as well as a few other Kontakt libraries, notably In Session Audio's Shimmer Shake Strike.
Accordions 2 exhibits a similar phenomenon as the ERA II Hurdy Gurdy while Shimmer Shake Strike nulls perfectly.
The plot thickens!
