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How Do You Pan a Send in Mainstage 2?


dab

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Okay I have spent the better part of a day trying to figure out how to pan a send for a stereo monitor mix. What am I missing?

 

BTW, zilch in the Help Resources as far as I can tell on this and many standard concerns regarding using the product in a live setting.

 

Gotta just be me not looking in the right place.

 

Thanks!

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Okay I have spent the better part of a day trying to figure out how to pan a send for a stereo monitor mix. What am I missing?

 

BTW, zilch in the Help Resources as far as I can tell on this and many standard concerns regarding using the product in a live setting.

 

Gotta just be me not looking in the right place.

 

Thanks!

 

Can you give more details?

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Okay I have spent the better part of a day trying to figure out how to pan a send for a stereo monitor mix. What am I missing?

 

BTW, zilch in the Help Resources as far as I can tell on this and many standard concerns regarding using the product in a live setting.

 

Gotta just be me not looking in the right place.

 

Thanks!

 

Ah, I think I understand what you're saying. So you have a channel strip (let's say going out your main output 1-2) and you would like that channel strip to send to your monitor output (say output 3-4). The question then becomes how to pan the bus send differently than the panning for the main output.

 

Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea how to do this... I'd never thought about it, but it does seem like something pretty basic I should know how to do!

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I would love if there was some way of doing this but I cant figure it out either.

Essentially what you wanna do is pan between two busses (or two outputs)

 

Here is my work around:

On a channel strip make two sends and assign them two separate busses (or outputs)–one will be your left monitor mix and the other will be the right.

 

I use a directional knob and map it to control the volume of each send, but I reverse the volume parameters so when the knob is all the way right one send is at full volume and the other is fully attenuated and when it is all the way left it is the reverse. You need to use the parameter curves to make it non linear. the curves have to be opposite to get the cross fade smooth. If this doesnt make sense let me know and Ill post pictures later

 

Because the knob is a volume knob the little lights dont light up like a knob that is assigned to be an actual pan, so I make the color of the knob black* so it doesn't appear so much like a volume knob. This is why I use the directional knob so it is easy to see where I am panned.

 

*to make the color more invisible: if you choose black and then choose "custom" you can you use the sliders to set the brightness to 12% and its almost impossible to tell.

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I would love if there was some way of doing this but I cant figure it out either.

Essentially what you wanna do is pan between two busses (or two outputs)

 

Here is my work around:

On a channel strip make two sends and assign them two separate busses (or outputs)–one will be your left monitor mix and the other will be the right.

 

I use a directional knob and map it to control the volume of each send, but I reverse the volume parameters so when the knob is all the way right one send is at full volume and the other is fully attenuated and when it is all the way left it is the reverse. You need to use the parameter curves to make it non linear. the curves have to be opposite to get the cross fade smooth. If this doesnt make sense let me know and Ill post pictures later

 

Because the knob is a volume knob the little lights dont light up like a knob that is assigned to be an actual pan, so I make the color of the knob black* so it doesn't appear so much like a volume knob. This is why I use the directional knob so it is easy to see where I am panned.

 

*to make the color more invisible: if you choose black and then choose "custom" you can you use the sliders to set the brightness to 12% and its almost impossible to tell.

 

Thanks that's what I ended up doing. Pro Tools provides a pan control for every send so i know it shouldn't be that big of a deal and the busses in Logic and Mainstage are already stereo so I can't imagine why they didn't do this already (or that seemingly no one has complained about it before me). Anyone trying to use Mainstage for anything more than a keyboard player or some other "individual" like a guitarist would stumble on this right away as I did.

 

It works but you only have eight send buses to work with for everything (unless someone knows how to make more than 8 work) so 2 monitor mixes uses up 4 sends. I am using multiple backing track stems (i.e. PLAYBACK channels) and I mix those down to 3 subgroups (Drums, Music, Vox) which is 3 more sends we're already up to 7. How bout a couple of effects sends? Ooops....thats a total of 9 so I am one send bus short. How bout mixing a 4 piece band so you want 4 monitor mixes? That's 8 sends all by itself so forget effect sends or sub mixes.

 

Mainstage is a GREAT idea but for serious work that's all it is at the moment....just an idea.

 

Oh yeah. Did I mention that if you duplicate a patch (to create the next song) All of the sends are disabled? the only way I have found to get it to work is to remove all of them and re-add them. The byproduct of this is that you lose all of your mappings to the UI. Classic Catch 22. I sent a bug report to Apple for this but I haven't heard anything back from them. Do they even support this product?

 

Color me highly disappointed.

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