Mix 51 Surround Panner and Mixer - for Pro Tools LE/M-Powered

Neyrinck MIX 51 is a suite of surround mixing plugins designed for use with ProTools LE (or M-Powered) software. Unlike ProTools HD systems, LE cannot create surround format tracks (like 5.1 or 7.1). making surround mixing virtually impossible. By taking advantage of recent changes to the RTAS plugin format which provides unlimited outputs, the MIX 51 system greatly expands the ProTools mixer and creates a powerful surround mixing environment. MIX 51 runs on version ProTools HD/LE or M-Powered version 7.0 or higher (Neyrinck recommends using at least 7.2) and requires a hardware interface with at least 6 outputs, such as MBox 2 Pro, 002 and 003 or M-Audio interfaces such as the Delta 1010 or Firewire 410.

It’s All About the Mixer

In this age of hyper exotic plugins which can turn sounds inside out and backwards, the venerable mixer seems a kind of utility. It does what it’s told: blend, balance and bounce, and unless there’s some problem - you’ve misrouted a signal, or it’s run out of channels – it stays way below the radar and simply functions. If it weren’t for automation, the mixer might escape our regard entirely, distracted by the waveform eye candy of arrange windows, transport meters, and the ever-growing pop-up list of the latest plugins. But the mixer is stalwart and does deliver, and the truth is, there is nothing we do in our studio chairs that is as profoundly compositional and frankly magical as combining sounds. With MIX 51 plugins inserted, the mixer expands its horizons exponentially.

So before setting up a ProTools session with MIX 51, it’s a good idea to be comfortable with the basics of using a mixer: routing busses, sending to effects, grouping tracks, recording to stems, etc. Once the surround system is configured there are a lot of signal paths to keep track of. For this article, we used MIX 51 on three different projects: a thirty second commercial spot, a 5.1 surround sound effects library, and surround mixes for an original music DVD product.

Surround System

MIX 51 is comprised of three plugins: Surround Panner, Surround Mixer, and LFE (subwoofer) Send. The basic idea is that you send your audio tracks to auxiliary tracks via busses (one per), instantiate a Surround Panner (mono or stereo) on each aux track, and which is fed to the Surround Mixer only. The audio doesn’t sound on this auxiliary track because the output is cleverly assigned to a phantom output pair. There is only one Mixer needed for each session and it can live on any track.

Surround Mixer Controls:

• Three 5.1 main busses with mute/solo
• Three quad send busses with mute/solo

Its job is to receive the signals from the Panners and output to its three Main Busses and three Quad Sends. Each Surround Mixer main bus has 6 outputs and the quad sends have four each (total thirty). Those can be brought back into the ‘normal’ mixer via yet more auxiliary tracks and then sent to the six outputs on the interface and fed to the speakers. Hard to visualize? Let’s do the numbers.

Mixer Inflation

Three stereo auxiliary tracks are used to receive each 5.1 main buss and assign it to the six outputs for Front (L/R), Center, Sub (LFE), Rear (L/R). Two stereo auxiliary tracks are used to receive each quad send buss and assign it to four outputs for Front (L/R) and Rear (L/R). If you use one 5.1 main buss and one quad send bus, that is a total of five tracks. If you use three 5.1 main busses and three quad send busses, that is a total of fifteen tracks. Each audio track you are mixing, such as dialog, requires a mono or stereo audio track to playback the sound and a mono or stereo auxiliary track to host the Surround Panner. So each audio track requires two tracks to process in the MIX 51 system. In the commercial spot, my ProTools session used six effects tracks, one dialog and one music mix – eight source tracks in all, which equals sixteen tracks to set up the panning. And my session used one 5.1 main buss and one quad effect send buss which used five more tracks to bring the mix back in to the Pro Tools mixer. And finally, three stereo Master tracks to control output level for the six channels. The ProTools mixer had a total of twenty-four tracks. And the MIX 51 system is designed to get as large as you need, or your ProTools system will accommodate because the Surround Mixer accepts an unlimited number of inputs from an unlimited number of Surround Panners.

Get Organized

Controlling this setup and keeping track of the various signal paths can be a challenge. Here’s where some very functional ProTools features come in handy. For example, it helps to name everything: tracks, busses, interface I/O, and use the color codings and comment fields to the max. I learned these tricks from the excellent MIX 51 demo session which ships with the product. You might want to also seriously consider using dual monitors. Developing session templates is also a great idea so you don’t have to rebuild the surround mixing environment each time. In the end, I worked a lot with a setup that hid the source and return tracks, so I could concentrate on the aux tracks with the Surround Panners in the Edit window.

Surround Panner

Of course that’s where all the automation is, and the real fun of playing with Mix 51. The Surround Panner let’s you automate all of its controls, allowing you to position every sound and program motion effects perfectly.

Surround Panner Controls:

• Left/Right Pan
• Front/Rear Pan
• Center Percent
• LFE Level
• Front Divergence
• Rear Divergence
• F/R Divergence
• Main Bus Output Volume
• Send Bus Volume

Programming the Panner

Obviously, the most fun is to be had with the 2d alpha controller to the left of the meters. The only problem I had was editing the data. Since ProTools only views one automation controller at a time, it’s difficult to edit the horizontal (L/R Pan) and vertical (F/R Pan) separately and keep the motion path smooth. I ended up doing lots of repeat recordings of the automation in order to get it perfect and avoid the editing process. I wish there were a way to create a macro controller within the plugin that prints a single controller in ProTools and then reads the data on playback and operates both sliders simultaneously.

Divergence

Beyond controlling the location with these controls, the Surround Panner gives you divergence controls to “soften” the spatial paths so that there is some amount of bleed between channels. This helps to avoid that kind of radical head snapping effect when the sound leaves one channel completely. Especially when designing the surround sfx sounds, I found that automating the Divergence control helped to avoid being overly obvious about the spatial effects, and sounded more natural overall. Being able to control and automate the Center channel level is especially useful: for the motion effects, little or no center channel works best, but adding the center and LFE channels on the music tracks (originally recorded in quad) helped hold it together. And speaking of LFE, the third plugin in this suite is the LFE Send which allows the user to send signal directly to the sub, without having to include it in the main busses of the Surround Mixer.

Optimized CPU usage

You might think that all this extra bussing activity would load down the CPU, what with all the extra tracks, busses, etc. But the design here seems quite efficient, and unused Surround Mixer busses have zero effect on the system until used. And that turned out to be good because I really loaded up the “Quad Reverb” tracks with an different assortment of mind bending plugs on the front and rear channels., which was especially powerful when designing the sfx sounds. And here’s where having dedicated Mute and Solo controls really helps to sort out 360 degrees of rich animated sound.

Migrate to HD Systems

It’s also possible to migrate the surround programming from LE or M-Powered sessions to HD systems native surround system. Using the “Paste Special” feature in HD, you can copy and paste the Left-Right Pan and Front-Rear Pan automation into an HD surround channel, and similarly transfer Divergence, Center and LFE levels.

Summary

Anyone interested in producing a surround mix in ProTools LE or M-Powered systems will find MIX 51 a powerful tool. Once you develop a few mixer templates that are configured with the Surround Mixer and Panners, getting sound up and around the various 5.1 monitors is straightforward, and fun especially when using the 2D panning control. Try experimenting with game sticks or tablets if mousing is awkward. And MIX 51 is pretty affordable, though if you’re considering DVD production remember that Dolby or DTS encoding software will also be required.

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Learn more about Mikail Graham here.