Audio Damage Panstation - Manual (Page 7)

How It Works
While the notion of an automatic panning plug-in may seem simple enough, Panstation adds a number of
special tricks which bear some explanation. Since Panstation’s roots go back to studio hardware processors of
yesteryear, we’ll explain Panstation’s operation in the context of a hardware mixing desk.
Imagine if you plugged the same instrument—a synthesizer, for example—into two adjacent input channels on
a mixer, and turned the pan pots on the two channels to the far left and far right respectively. If you moved
the gain sliders on both channels up to the same level, the synthesizer sound would appear to be placed at
the center of the stereo field, because its sound would be equally loud in both the left and right channels.
Now, if you moved the left slider down, the sound would seem to move to the right because it would be louder
in the right channel. If you pushed the left slider back up to its original position and pulled the right slider
down, you’d hear the sound move to the left. If you repeatedly moved the sliders in opposite directions—one
up and the other down, alternately—the sound would move back and forth.
Obviously you could control the motion of the sound with the motion of your fingers on the faders. You’re your
fingers slowly and the sound would move slowly; move them quickly and the sound moves faster. Make small
motions with your fingers and the sound wouldn’t move far from the center of the stereo field, but yank the
sliders all the way up and down and the sound would jump back and forth from one far side to the other.
You might be wondering why we’re imagining doing this with a pair of level faders on two channels and not
just the panning knob on one channel. The answer is flexibility. Suppose you move the faders together, in the
same direction, rapidly up and down. Since the loudness of the sound will change by the same amount in both
channels, rather than panning effects you’ll hear tremolo effects, since tremolo is simply a repeated change in
a sound’s loudness.
If you actually did this rather than imagining it, you’d probably grow tired of moving the faders and it would
certainly be difficult to create the same exact effect more than once. This is why auto-panners—and
Panstation—were invented. Panstation is like a pair of magic fingers on your imagined mixer faders.
Panstation’s controls let you move those fingers rapidly or slowly, over small distances or large ones, in
opposite directions or together.
To put it in technical terms, Panstation uses a pair of low-frequency oscillators (LFOs) to control the gain of
the left and right audio channels. By varying the frequency, amplitude, wave shape, and relative phase of the
two LFOs, Panstation lets you quickly create a variety of panning, tremolo, and gating effects that would be
difficult and tedious to create by other means.