Panning not working in Logic Pro

[NickBujak]

Hello, I have been having trouble panning a track in Logic. It is a Snare part recorded in mono. I've set the track to Stereo, and I've also set the pan knob to stereo. When I hard pan left or right nothing changes in the stereo image, though the sound does dim a bit. The stereo meters on the track and on the stereo bus confirm that no change is occurring in the stereo placement of the sound. I've triple checked that all the plugins are set in stereo mode at every step of the process. HOWEVER, when I create a summing stack of duplicates of the snare part (which I initially did to try to create a left and right duplicate of the snare), the stack itself CAN pan L/R.

[des99]

3 hours ago, NickBujak said:

It is a Snare part recorded in mono. I've set the track to Stereo

If it's a mono recording, it should be a mono track/channel. Set this back to mono, and the pan knob should pan that mono track inside your stereo mix as normal.

Edited July 13, 2023 by des99

[David Nahmani]

5 hours ago, NickBujak said:

o. When I hard pan left or right nothing changes in the stereo image

There may be a routing issue in your Mixer, we would need to see that specific example along with the input/output routing of your channel strips visible on a screen capture like the one I share below. Here you can see the results of panning a stereo track (with the Stereo Panner) on the meters of the destination channel strip (here, the Stereo Out): 

However in your case as des99 suggested you should use a mono-input channel strip with a standard Pan knob. 

[JakobP]

1 hour ago, David Nahmani said:

Here you can see the results of panning a stereo track (with the Stereo Panner) on the meters of the destination channel strip (here, the Stereo Out): 

That looks funny, shouldn't it show on the source channel too ? Like this ?

 

Edited July 13, 2023 by JakobP

[NickBujak]

Thanks for all the responses everyone. I ended up "fixing" the problem by creating a blank audio track and then dragging the snare audio region onto it. I don't know why this worked. When I panned on the "old" track, nothing--when I pan on the "fresh" track, we have the power of stereo.

 

I have a few questions in response to your responses:

 

1) When you talk about "routing," do you mean sends and outputs? There is the  "input" selector at the top of the strip, but I don't know what that does when I'm using an audio file. I know that when I record new sound I need to match that to the input of my interface, but with audio that I've already recorded it doesn't seem to do anything? For example, when I select "no input" it doesn't change anything about how the channel behaves. Or, maybe it does?

 

2) What changes when I change the input from mono to stereo if the audio was recorded in mono? As far as I can tell, it just gives me more panning options, which is why I even made the change in the first place. (I.e., I would have kept it in mono if panning worked in mono. I changed it as an experiment to see if anything would happen. It doesn't seem to change the sound.) I read on some older forum that I needed to make sure that my plugins were not in "mono" mode because that would squash the stereo information. As you can tell, I'm quite confused. 

 

Again, thanks so much for the responses!

Edited July 14, 2023 by NickBujak

[David Nahmani]

17 hours ago, NickBujak said:

1) When you talk about "routing," do you mean sends and outputs?

Yes, that's what I meant. 

17 hours ago, NickBujak said:

There is the  "input" selector at the top of the strip, but I don't know what that does when I'm using an audio file.

The input pop-up menu controls only which source is recorded onto the audio track when you record it. 

17 hours ago, NickBujak said:

2) What changes when I change the input from mono to stereo if the audio was recorded in mono?

The format of the signal that goes into the first Audio FX slot, but if you choose stereo then the L and R signals are going to be the same. 

[Mabou2]

OK, possibly an interesting addition to this conversation.  I found this thread because I was frustrated trying to figure out why panning suddenly quit working.  I tried everything written above, and suggestions from other threads, nothing helped.

 

Then I finally wondered about the hardware I'm using... and I FIXED the problem.  

I had recently switched to a Mac Pro, feeding a stereo out cable splitter to from the Mac to channels 1 and 2 (L&R) on my mixing board.

The problem (FOR ME) was the mixing board.  Channels 1 and 2 on my board both had the pan set to center.  So when I adjusted the pan in Logic Pro, nothing seemed to happen (except slight volume changes) even thought I could see the meters (in LP) indicate that the pan was working.

As soon as I set my mixing board pan to hard left on Channel 1 and hard right on Channel 2, everything became normal again.  Logic pro works as expected and the sound in my room is better than before.

Hopefully this helps anyone still in the throws of frustration.