How do you work around lack of panning via Overbridge?

Am finding it to be a real pain having the panning removed from tracks when recording with Overbridge. Say for example on the hats - I had a really nice panning thing going on between the CH and OH moving around the stereo field but with Overbridge both channels are forced to be on one audio channel and panning is bypassed, seems like a real bummer. What can I do apart from just record the hats seperately using the main audio outs?

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I also find this to be a bummer. I’ve actually taken to ignoring all stereo elements of the rytm when writing.

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Hmm, I haven’t tried recording via Overbridge yet, but this sounds annoying.

i pan in my DAW

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This. Or record the main output for each track separately

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I’ve not used Overbridge yet, please forgive this naive question: I had assumed Overbridge made the AR’s tracks available as separate channels in my DAW. Is that what it does?

If this is what it does, then it makes sense the panning is removed when transferring the audio to a DAW. The AR’s tracks are mono. That pan control on the AMP page affects how the mono tracks are mixed into the stereo bus at the output end of the AR’s signal flow. When you siphon off the track audio to a DAW, you need to mix it into stereo somewhere other than the AR’s mixer.

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Using OB with RYTM, the tracks that share a channel such as OH and CH are routed to the exact same audio track and there doesn’t appear to be a way to override this. This means that the OH and CH have to recorded on the same track (without panning) when recording via OB, which makes life a little frustrating. Was disappointed to realise this is the case as it means I won’t be using OB for recording most of the time now.

That’s the same as the AR w/out Overbridge too. The AR has 8 channels of analog signal path, not the 12 hinted at by the pads.

Yeah but at least without OB you can choose where the sounds sit in the stereo field. OB removes that option for 6 of the 12 sounds, which seems counterintuitive.

I guess it’s counter-intuitive, yeah. The interface is set up for performing with 12 stereo tracks.

In reality you have eight tracks and they’re mono (plus the stereo FX returns). The (Pan) control, and the (Track Level) control are more like controls on the internal mixer, not the track.

Yeah, still love the RYTM and the OB plugin is super helpful on many fronts so I can’t moan too much.

You’re right! That being said, since the OH and CH are treated in stereo including panning, inside the RYTM, I don’t see why Oberbridge couldn’t manage this!

I’m pretty sure tracks 9 and 10 are just as mono as the rest of them. The [AMP] page is the same on all tracks. Did I miss something?

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Nope. You missed nothing.

Folks are just not accepting / understanding that the Rytm’s stereo bus (separate from OB) is nothing but a mixer. 12 mono “tracks” with a pan knob on each, summing to a stereo mix, and Overbridge taps those tracks individually before the mixer (and therefore before the pan).

The tracks are mono because the analog voices are mono.

Overbridge is not a supplement to Rytm’s analog stereo summing mixer. It’s a replacement for it.

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Could you record the panning motions as midi? At the same time as the audio, and then use that as an automation in the DAW to reach a similar result?

While that makes sense, you’d think Elektron could implement panning in the OB plugin itself. Many other plugins do. I use FLStudio, so every mixer channel is setup as stereo. OB could just have the LR data reflected in the plugin itself, yeah?

So, double the number of audio tracks OB presents to the DAW just to replicate something the DAW already does, and with more control?

Except that if you spend days/weeks/months working on an album on the Elektron boxes, then you need to find a way to translate any and all panning information/automation/etc. to your DAW? That’s a huge pain in the arse. For some of us, the DAW is only used for final recording, but now we gotta recreate all that other work we’ve already done?

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I understand your frustration.

My guess is that OB pulls audio from the mono tracks before the mixer, and hands it off to the OB system. The pan controls and p-locks directly control the Rytm mixer, not the audio tracks. That information you’re hoping for isn’t in the audio data. So to get panning over OB, they’d have had to:

  • either have 16 channels of audio over OB, not 8. That’s double the bandwidth and USB is potentially a very busy bus. This would also mean making the Rytm’s mixer 16 channel rather than 8, which would have put the cost of the hardware up noticeably
  • or add a control data element to the OB protocol, which is less bandwidth but more complexity and ripe for scope creep

I can’t imagine that, with the INT+EXT encoder destination functions, that Elektron couldn’t find a way to transfer that directly to the OB VST somehow.