Ableton Liveschool - Auto Pan Device Tutorial

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Ableton Auto Pan device tutorial. The video shows many beginner and advanced tips and tricks for how it can be used in a song - and goes way beyond regular panning. At it's most simple, panning can be thought of as a way to control the left / right movement of sounds in a stereo-speaker or stereo-headphone setup. Ableton Live's in-built Auto Pan device is designed to do this for you automatically, moving the controls in a repeated pattern and at a constant speed.

The result of repetitive stereo panning like this is that it makes a sound more interesting to the listener. In a song, you can make long drawn-out sounds more animated and lively, or you can use it for mixing tricks such as highlighting a sound that isn't standing out enough in the mix. Auto Panning can actually begin to change the sound itself, depending on how fast the Rate dial is set. Anything from a gentle sway between left and right, to a throbbing vibrational effect, to less expected results such as a gurgly underwater effects and crunchy distortion. Beyond panning though, the Ableton's Auto Pan Device gets much more interesting when the we turn the Phase dial.

In order to understand what the Phase dial does, it helps to know what panning really is. First, it's not a left-right control. It DOES create a left-right effect, but that is actually an illusion. Panning is really just a volume control, and it creates the stereo effect by turning the volume of each speaker up and down in an out-of-phase (opposite) direction. The result is the impression that the sound is sliding from one speaker to the other, but actually the sound is just getting quieter in one speaker and louder in the other.

By turning the Phase dial to 0º (where 180º is perfectly out-of-phase and 0º is perfectly in-phase) the speaker volumes will pulse up and down together. Slightly above zero are and you start to hear simulated around-the-head 3D motion - as if the sound is being chased from one speaker to the other - but back down to 0º and there is no longer any panning effect. Only volume effects.

The tips and tricks in this video show many uses of automated volume control like this - tremolo effects, beat-chopping effects, volume crescendos, adding groove to a bassline, making hi-hats sound more natural, a simulated side-chain effect, a dj transform effect between two tracks, parallel chain effects between 2 racks, fade-outs and fade-ins.

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This video is part of an ongoing series of free tutorials on Ableton Live's audio effect devices by Ableton Liveschool - an Ableton Certified music production school in Sydney, Australia and you can have these tutorials sent to you by signing up here: