VI Pro slot panning and MIR

[Jerry Gerber]

Hey there,

When I use VI Pro standalone and create a patch with slot panning, such as a flute, when I play 3 notes I can clearly hear the 3 flutes, one on the left, one in the center and one on the right, as panned.  It sounds spacious and full, like 3 instruments are playing.

But when I play that same exact patch with VI Pro running in VE Pro and MIR, MIR seems to cancel out the slot panning.  I have tried both checking and unchecking the MIR preference called "normalize power pan", but this has no effect.  Is this a bug?  The slot-panning is really useful for giving some space to one patch acting as 3 discrete instruments...

Thanks,

Jerry

http://www.jerrygerber.com

 

 

)

[Beat Kaufmann]

@jsg said:

...But when I play that same exact patch with VI Pro running in VE Pro and MIR, MIR seems to cancel out the slot panning.  I have tried both checking and unchecking the MIR preference called "normalize power pan", but this has no effect.  Is this a bug?  The slot-panning is really useful for giving some space to one patch acting as 3 discrete instruments...

Hi Jerry
I hope I understood what you mean. For example, if you play 3 different staccato notes with the same instrument, it may be that each of the notes has a bit of a different panning. This is especially the case with the older libraries (...Solo Violin 1,... but not Solo Violin 2). This probably comes from the fact that the instruments were recorded relatively close to the stereo microphone. Because such recording sessions took several days, and then the best samples were selected, you can actually hear the different pannings of day 1, 2, or 3. If a solo instrument is not positioned in the exact same place (every day) it comes to such unwanted pannings.
When I say "exactly in the same place" I mean "cm-exactly".

The stereo width of the instrument (dry sound) depends on how wide you choose the "oval" (Instrument Icon) within MIR. The narrower the oval the more the sound will be monoized.

Try the following:
Put your flute in front of the conductor (in front of the recording microphone in MIR) and draw the oval in the width so that it occupies the whole stage from right to left.
Now you should actually hear the mini-pannings again.

Beat

[Jerry Gerber]

@jsg said:

...But when I play that same exact patch with VI Pro running in VE Pro and MIR, MIR seems to cancel out the slot panning.  I have tried both checking and unchecking the MIR preference called "normalize power pan", but this has no effect.  Is this a bug?  The slot-panning is really useful for giving some space to one patch acting as 3 discrete instruments...

Hi Jerry
I hope I understood what you mean. For example, if you play 3 different staccato notes with the same instrument, it may be that each of the notes has a bit of a different panning. This is especially the case with the older libraries (...Solo Violin 1,... but not Solo Violin 2). This probably comes from the fact that the instruments were recorded relatively close to the stereo microphone. Because such recording sessions took several days, and then the best samples were selected, you can actually hear the different pannings of day 1, 2, or 3. If a solo instrument is not positioned in the exact same place (every day) it comes to such unwanted pannings.
When I say "exactly in the same place" I mean "cm-exactly".

The stereo width of the instrument (dry sound) depends on how wide you choose the "oval" (Instrument Icon) within MIR. The narrower the oval the more the sound will be monoized.

Try the following:
Put your flute in front of the conductor (in front of the recording microphone in MIR) and draw the oval in the width so that it occupies the whole stage from right to left.
Now you should actually hear the mini-pannings again.

Beat

 

Hi Beat,

Thanks for replying!   I tried doing what you suggest, but it doesn't change the issue.   Let me try to explain it differently.  I set up a patch called "flute" using VSL orchestral cube flute samples.   I used three slots, each slot has the same exact sample-set.   Slot 1a is panned center, slot 2a is panned left and slot 3a is panned right. Before I was using MIR (I was using an outboard reverb) when I played a note and then another note while the first note is held down it would trigger the sample in the 2nd slot, and would be panned differently than the 1st note, sounding to the left.  If I held down two notes and played a 3rd,  the 3rd slot sample-set would be triggered, panned to the right.  So a triad would sound very nice, with space and clarity between the notes. 

But MIR cancels this slot-panning.  When I play a triad, the three notes do not have that space, the slot-panning is overridden, and though the reverb sounds wonderful, the spacing of the notes is too narrow.  Placing the instrument right above Mic 1 and changing the width of the dry signal in MIR doesn't create the stereo width I am used to hearing. 

Does this make sense?

Best,

Jerry

[Dietz]

Hi Jerry,

the way MIR is meant to get used in your scenario is to use three individual player instances with individual MIR Icons on the stage of a MIR Venue. Panning is an inherent part of spatialisation - which is what MIR has been made for ;-)

If you want to use these three instances "as one", just make sure to use the same MIDI channel for all of them.

Kind regards,

[Jerry Gerber]

@Dietz said:

Hi Jerry,

the way MIR is meant to get used in your scenario is to use three individual player instances with individual MIR Icons on the stage of a MIR Venue. Panning is an inherent part of spatialisation - which is what MIR has been made for 😉

If you want to use these three instances "as one", just make sure to use the same MIDI channel for all of them.

Kind regards,

 

Hi Dietz,

OK, I get it now, thank you for responding so quickly.  Might it be possible in the future to allow the slot panning to carry through over to MIR?   The reason I ask is because if I make three flutes discrete instruments but on the same MIDI channel, there cannot be individual musical parts!   To have 3 flutes playing three different melodic lines requires 3 MIDI channels, no?   If I make them play on 3 different channels, I use up more than 16 MIDI channels for my winds, which I don't want to do.  Slot panning is very useful, it's too bad this funtionality gets overridden (and nullified) with MIR.

Best,

Jerry

www.jerrygerber.com

[Dietz]

@Another User said:

Might it be possible in the future to allow the slot panning to carry through over to MIR? 

Well - you can't have your cake and eat it, and you can't go skiing with a jetski. 😉 What is just a panning-issue for you is indeed a question of two completely different approaches to "spatialisation". Technically, I can't see any possibility for a meaningful combination between the two, sorry to say so.

Kind regards,