don4777


You might also want to look at the options that you have enabled during the bounce. Not sure what you meant about the guitar track only tacking 10-15% of the track. Routing the mono guitar track to a stereo bus is fine. Just make sure you have automation enabled in the bounce or your mono inputs will appear as mono and will appear on whatever side or the stereo pair that it is coming in. For example, guitar on input 1L (left sided of the input 1-2 stereo pair) will appear 100% on the left - regardless of the track panning if you don't have automation enabled for the bounce.

Thanks for the reply Don, I can confirm I do have automation enabled in the bounce to tracks, I also have busses enabled and I have no effects, Channel Tools or otherwise, on the Master Bus. I have Channel Tools on the lead guitar bus, to control the output from Guitar Rig 4 into the stereo field, but as I said, when soloed or playing back the full project, it all sounds balanced across the stereo field as you would expect.
 

Notice I put 'fixed' onto the threat title and not 'solved'. I will share what happened here, I am delighted because I can now complete the final edits and plan to put it on the songs forum very soon now.

Basically I found the problem by going through the entire signal chain in my track. From balances on individual tracks, checking interleaves, busses, interleaves on busses, soloing them all in turn, checking outputs from VST's including Channel Tools on an acoustic guitar bus and Guitar Rig on a lead guitar bus.

I finally get to the master bus, still everything seemed OK, but realised that there was one more stage in the X2 signal chain, which was the interface outs. Even with the console view across 2 monitors, I couldnt find them, and hadn't seen them for a long time. By clicking and dragging on the right edge of the console, I found the three sets of outs for my audio interface, and lo and behold, the main outs were not locked together and the left channel was set 6 to 7 dB higher than the right channel ! I locked and fixed them, performed another bounce to tracks, and finally, both the waveform and the playback were back in balance. Total Joy of course. I also know how this happened. A few nights ago, I was fiddling with ACT and my sliders on my PCR-500, and when I was controlling the busses, I worked one slider which didn't appear to be attached to any parameter, after waddling it about for a minute or so, I though best to leave it alone and attempted to put it back in the position I found it, correctly as it turned out, thinking I might be changing a parameter I had simply failed to see. I will have to go back and experiment, but it is almose certain that it was controlling the left channel of the main outs, which were permanently hidden to me at that point...one big mystery solved.

However, this poses a strange conundrum. Why did my playback sound balanced when I played through the normal project with all tracks, yet only appeared left biased when I bounced down? I tryed bouncing down both from the master channel (ie before the outs) and from the outs, and got the same, off centered sonic results each time. I also did try an export from selecting all the tracks to a wav file, and this was also left biased now. Surely by logic, if I had mixed 'compensating' for my left out being raised, putting the outs in sync again would then make the project right biased during playback. However, no, it still plays back with the stereo balance intact. This seems to defy all logic, unless someone has a decent explaination.

However, I am delighted to understand what happened and fix it, albeit scratching my head as how I got the results I did... I think this is worth sharing for future forum searches however because the main outs are so often out of sight and out of mind, that I can see how it would be possible for anyone to accidently move them on a control surface (particularly if they are included in an ACT preset) and hear the consequences without it being obvious where the problem subsequently lay.

Hope this helps and thanks for your suggestions guys.

Garry Kiosk

Are you monitoring through different interface outputs?

If so you could be hearing MASTER --> MONITOR OUT when you are tracking, mixing, listening to the project etc.

When you export/bounce you could be going: MASTER --> "WONKY" OUT

Then, when you listen back to this bounce you will hear the out of balance (as it went through the "wonky" interface output) so the actual processed audio will have this inbalance - even if you listen through different MONITOR outputs

Just a thought!

Boydie, I think you may be onto something there...somewhere. My main monitors are connected to the first pair of outputs (called 1 and 2 I think, I am away from my studio right now), then my rack mounted headphone amp is connected to the second output (2+3) I was so elated and tired last night after locating the problem that I closed down and didn't investigate further, which I will do tonight. However most of my monitoring is done on my studio monitors and I use the headphone amp for tracking most of the time.

Also, the difference was not so slight that I could have been in danger of decieving myself by lookiing at a wonky waveform when listening. The drop in the right channel was huge, all centered instrumentation almost disappearing and unmistakeable.

Thanks for the suggestion, I feel I want to investigate further, I certainly think it helps to know how Sonar processes mixdowns / bounces to tracks differently when selecting either master or main outs.

Garry