I was mixing a new song the other day in Live, and after spending way too much time tweaking the levels and stereo positions of the different tracks, I had an idea for what might be a better way to handle this.

In my head, when I’m doing this, I’m picturing the different instruments and sounds in different locations in a room, with the listener’s ears in the middle of one wall. However, Live, like most tools I’ve seen, make you translate that picture in your head into pan and level settings. I’m no pro, I just do this as a hobby, so this takes me much longer than it should to get right. It’s annoyed me since my 4 track days as a pimply youth. Why not let me simply lay out the tracks spatially, just like I’m picturing it?

What I want is something like the image above, where I can have an icon for each of the tracks, and I can drag them vertically and horizontally to position them in the mix. Obviously, their position on the x-axis would determine the pan, and the position on the y-axis would determine the level.

I’ve actually been thinking about different ways to actually implement this. I best I’ve come up with (or more accurately, the one that sucks the least) is to create a software MIDI controller. This approach would have the benefit of being two way, ie. changes made via the pan and level settings in the DAW could reflect in the software controller, and vice versa. Also, dragging things around during playback would feed midi to the DAW and be recorded as automation. Unfortunately you’d have to map the x and y position of icon to the relevant track’s controls using MIDI learn (or maybe using some sort of Mackie emulation to avoid having to map, but I know zero about how easy Mackie emulation is to do).  Like I said, not ideal, but not as crap as some of my earlier thoughts.

One of which was to build a VST that takes multiple inputs, however AFAIK, this would bypass the host DAW’s pan and level setting per track. I’ve been playing with writing a few VST’s lately, and I think this was a case of "the whole world looking like a nail".

Ideally, DAW manufacturers would simply include this as an alternate Mix view. Would make life a lot easier for both beginners in tools like Garageband, and even more experienced but non-professional people in other tools. You could have standard "templates" or starting points for common mix configurations, then tweak them as needed.

I’ll add it to my list of ideas to implement one day, but hopefully before it gets to the top of the list someone will come along and tell me it’s already been done. Then I could simply use it.