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Accessit Autopanner

Article from Home & Studio Recording, May 1986

A surprisingly useful little effects unit for less than the price of a good fuzz box... it's got to be a winner.


This versatile autopanner is a welcome addition to the ever expanding range of Accessit budget sound processors.


Most home recording enthusiasts will be familiar with at least some of the Accessit range of processors but for those who aren't, a brief resume is in order. Rather than opt for the rack mounting approach and all the expensive metalwork that that entails, Bandive, the manufacturers, hit on the idea of building cost-effective processors in inexpensive plastic boxes all of which can be powered by an external 25v unregulated power supply or by a regulated 18v supply. Both options are manufactured by Bandive and each one can power several units.

Inside, the unit follows the usual Bandive pattern in that all the components, controls and sockets are mounted on a single PCB so there is no wiring to cause problems. The case is held together by the control pot nuts and the jack socket nuts so disassembly is very easy.

Power On is indicated by a rectangular red LED on the front panel.

Features



The Autopanner is designed to take a mono input and pan it between the two outputs so that if the outputs are connected to two channels of a mixing desk and panned hard left and hard right, the signal will pan between the left and right speakers.

There are three modes of operation and the simplest one just sweeps the signal back and forth at a speed set up on the front panel. The range of the Speed control is quite wide and ranges from an overfast burble to a slow sweep that takes around half a minute to execute. Two LEDs on the front panel show the sweep status; the LEDs cross fade as the sounds pan. This is a free running effect so there is no way to synchronise it to the programme material.

A more exciting possibility is opened up by the trigger mode of operation which is selected by a front panel latching pushbutton switch. In this mode, the signal rests at one side or the other until the fire button is pressed or a trigger pulse (up to 20v positive going) is received at the rear panel socket. Once thus triggered, the input sweeps across to the opposite output at whatever rate is set up on the speed control. If the unit is retriggered before the sweep is complete, the sound will start its return journey regardless.

The final control is the Span control and this biases the sweep to the left or right. For example, with Span set anticlockwise, the output will sweep between left and centre and vice versa. That's all there is to it in terms of controls so what can you do with it?

In Use



I must admit that I've never really considered buying an autopanner of any sort, I've always thought of them as an expensive gimmick that it's quite easy to live without. However, this one is certainly not expensive by any stretch of the imagination and as it happens, I came up with some very pleasing effects.

The straight free-running sweep mode can be a bit of an overkill and it's impossible to get it in perfect sync with a track but what you can do is to pan the echo or reverb returns at a slowish rate and this creates a sense of movement without being too obvious. Of course there is no reason not to pan a guitar solo or whatever but beware of being too clichéd.

Both of the triggered modes are more artistically useful and in the manual mode you can initiate the pan whenever you want just by pressing the Fire button. This way the timing can be as accurate as you are and the sweep speed can be anything from a snap change to a slow pan.

The same is true of the externally triggered mode and I used a trigger pulse from a drum machine to good effect. Most drum machines allow you to program at least one external trigger output and this can be used to control the sweep of a synth line for instance. With the Sweep control set at maximum speed, the synth will appear to change sides every time a trigger pulse is sent and this can sound good on arpeggios where you can get alternate notes to come from alternate sides. If your synth has a positive trigger output you can use this to control the Autopanner so that each note will appear on alternate sides. Those of you into ambient music may find the effect of having the Autopanner set to a slow speed pleasing as this would give a novel pseudo-random panning effect which would depend on the style and speed of playing.

In terms of signal levels and matching, the unit works at the semi-pro -10dB standard and it's as well to feed it plenty of signal to maintain a good signal to noise ratio. Too much signal will result in distortion but you may not notice this as the circuitry soft clips giving a smooth progressive distortion if overdriven.

Conclusions



I would never advocate that a home recording enthusiast should spend a lot of money on an autopanner when there are more pressing things needed, but at around the price of an effects pedal, this Accessit unit offers quite a lot of scope if used tastefully and its noise/distortion performance is surprisingly good provided the input levels are set about right. To this end, some sort of peak level LED might have been an advantage but I didn't find that it took much setting up. Also the feel of the sweep was as smooth as any unit I have tested and there was no annoying click or dead spot when the sweep changes direction.

Don't forget to budget for a power supply to go with it but don't worry unduly, the cheaper one is only a few pounds and Bandive are always doing special offers to make them even cheaper.

To sum it up then, autopanners are by no means an essential addition to your studio but at this price, can you afford not to have one? You can generate some subtle, even ethereal effects with this unit and there is a lot of scope for experimentation, especially using the external trigger.

The Accessit Autopanner costs £60 including VAT.

Further details are available from: Bandive, (Contact Details).



Previous Article in this issue

The Studio Dominator

Next article in this issue

The Long and the Short of it


Publisher: Home & Studio Recording - Music Maker Publications (UK), Future Publishing.

The current copyright owner/s of this content may differ from the originally published copyright notice.
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Home & Studio Recording - May 1986

Donated & scanned by: Mike Gorman

Gear in this article:

Studio FX > Accessit > Autopanner


Gear Tags:

Spatialization

Review by Shirley Gray

Previous article in this issue:

> The Studio Dominator

Next article in this issue:

> The Long and the Short of it...


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