I ran into this issue when tone matching the sounds of my left and right guitar. I took one guitar take, copied it on both the L and R tracs, and began tweaking knobs. At some point I decided to try a little compression before the amp, and bypassed all other plugins than the compressor. This is when I noticed that the sound was coming pretty far from the right (Roughly as far as if I had a single mono take and panned it around 50% right), though the only sounds playing where the identical guitar tracks (Identical as in played once, and copied onto the other side). The issue persists with three sets of headphones. I also tried switching the headphones around to test that it’s actually the sound going more to the right channel than the left and not just my left ear being deaf, and yes, it’s the sound going more to the right channel, not my ears.
Any idea why this is? It’s not exactly super critical as for the actual song I’d obviously have a different take on the L and R channels, but it’s still weird.
Okay, I figured it out. I was about to tell you there’s no processing on either track, and that’s kinda true, as I’ve disabled every plugin in the project, but I just noticed that the panning issue doesn’t appear if I create two new tracks with no plugins on them at all. After some testing I noticed that having Neural DSP Nolly on the left channel and Neural DSP Soldano on the right channel, even when both plugins are disabled, causes the panning issue. No idea why as they shouldn’t do anything when disabled, but if I remove the Neural plugins the issue disappears (Both of them, removing just one doesn’t fix it) . Weird stuff.
Yes, Raino’s null test should reveal the problem, But if you want to leave the plugins in but not on, instead of ‘disabling’ them, try turning them off on the plugin while still in the strip. Sometimes, with some plugins, there seems to be ‘leakage’ when they are just disabled. (I don’t know) Maybe this is a question from me to people like Raino who could possibly answer: Is there a difference between ‘disable’ and ‘off’ with some plugins?
The important thing is that you have a solution.
Generally, it’s a good idea to turn plugins you don’t need off (instead of just disabling them), because only then will they not eat CPU resources.
If you disable them, there still shouldn’t be the leakage that appears to be happening here, so I’m going to be watching this thread to learn what’s going on with that.
But first a jargon check - the states are On/Off and Bypass.
A good way to think of Bypass is that it is Muting both the Input & Output of the effect while the effect continues operating. The easiest way to play around with this is to put a simple Delay with a lot of repeats on a fairly sparse Track.
Thanks TimoOO and Raino. I will play around with your idea. Also, jargon is very important; we should all speak the same language. A big difference btwn disable and bypass.