Converting one stereo track into a dual mono track?

Bristol_Jonesey
It need not result in a stereo track Ron, just point your mics/interface inputs to 2 mono tracks yes?

bitflipper

cowboydan
...I think the pan pot on a stereo track is more of a balance pot and cannot work as a pan pot. The channel tools plugin is a great work around, but I would rather see a stereo track with 2 pan pots that I can use to put left and right where I want them without using extra plugins.

This is exactly correct; the pan slider is a balance control like the "balance" knob on your stereo. It simply changes the volume of each channel inversely and will not effect the perception of position in quite the same way that you hear with mono tracks.
 
That's not a design defect, it's just that panning in the traditional sense has no meaning on a stereo track where the two channels are fixed at hard left and right. What the Channel Tools plugin does is to treat each channel as if it was a mono track, bleeding some of the left into the right and vice versa the same way a mono track is panned.
 
Some DAWs do indeed offer dual-pan controls for stereo tracks. If you have Superior Drummer, take a look at its mixer for an example. This gives more precise control, at the expense of some convenience. What it will not do is make the left sound "more left" and the right "more right", since your starting point in a stereo track is already hard-left and hard-right.
 
The advantage of split-mono over using Channel Tools is that the left and right signals are now completely independent of one another and may be effected and routed separately. This can open up some interesting possibilities with delays and reverbs such as panning a reverb send to the opposite side or delaying one side of a reverb effect but not the other. You can also EQ left and right separately even if you don't have an EQ that can do that to a stereo signal, which is useful for adding width.
 
I use Channel Tools on almost every stereo track. Say you have a luscious pad coming out of a synth that makes good use of internal panning to give movement and texture (Omnisphere's famous for that). But you don't want it to occupy the whole panorama, or need to balance it against a similar texture that's also in the mix. Channel Tools lets you move the pad(s) to one side while preserving the effect of the moving modulation within the patch.
 
This technique is essential for any true stereo source, such as a Leslie effect. A Leslie ain't a Leslie without stereo, but the physical speaker is still usually set to one side of the stage. You normally want a Hammond to be similarly situated in the mix, off to one side but definitely in stereo.

Anderton

cowboydan
This was a design choice by cakewalk to use a "balance pot"on stereo tracks instead of 2 pan pots.

Not really. They're just following the protocol for stereo track mixing that's been in existence since the early '60s.

bitflipper
Actually, Craig, if you think back to consoles you saw in the 60's, how many of them even had stereo channels? I'm guessing none. The first time I ever saw a stereo channel on a mixer was in the late-80's, and that was on a compact Yamaha 8-channel mixer. I assumed they did it to save space.