"Faking" two-channel output using panning?

[Kanthos]

I came up with something that I used at church on Sunday to fake two-channel output with my gear, but I'm second-guessing it.

The scenario is that I play two keyboards at once, with two or more sounds playing at the same time. Most of the time, I want them dry or using the effects built-in to their VSTs (Native Instruments B4-II using their built-in Leslie speaker modelling, and so on), but sometimes I want to run a particular sound through my guitar effects box. If I'm playing two sounds, say a wurlitzer and a B3, I want to process the wurlitzer with the guitar box but have the B3 play clean.

Now, my audio interface output is one pair of 1/4" jacks (the interface is an Edirol UA-25). I set it up on Sunday as follows: left output from the UA-25 straight into my amp, right output from the UA-25 into my guitar effects box (Line6 PodXT), and PodXT's right output into the amp. Then, if I wanted an instrument to be clean, I panned it entirely to the left in NI Kore, and if I wanted it processed by the PodXT, I panned it entirely to the right. I then ran the amp into the system.

My concern is the final output from the amp. Will the sound in the amp still have the panning, or by converting stereo to two mono channels, will the sounds be mixed together in the amp? In other words, if I play piano clean, it will be panned entirely left in Kore, so would it sound only on the left side of the amp and not on the right?

[analoq]

Explain these two things first:

- what sort of amp you have

- how your amp is feeding the PA system

I know the answer regardless, but you'll get a more reliable answer if you explain the entire signal path instead of just part of it.

[Kanthos]

Hmm, I'd thought I'd mentioned the amp already. It's a Roland KC-150 4-channel mixing amp. Inputs 2-4 are -20dbu 1/4" inputs, and input 1 can either be a -50dbu or -20dbu 1/4" input or an xlr. The only output is a 1/4" +4dbu.

When I had it set up this past Sunday, I went into the PA system through a DI box.

[analoq]

hmm, one of us is missing something basic.

Your amp only has 1 mono output (aside from the low freq out) and obviously there's only one woofer.. so stereo output of any sort from that amp was an impossibility from the start.

The "panned" signals will be mixed together.

[Kanthos]

I'm sure I'm the one missing something basic, namely a full understanding of how panning works, although I think I've got it now. And I think that unless I'm missing something else, all the inputs to the amp are mono and the one output is mono (and furthermore, the amp probably mixes in mono, judging by a commeint in the manual that says that the Aux input is converted to mono), so by panning an instrument hard left in Kore and then converting to mono, I undo the effect of panning. So really, I'm not "faking" anything at all, I'm just using a single stereo bus as two mono buses, and since my gear expects mono inputs, all is fine.

Thanks for the help.