Firstly,
Central Moon Signal is an excellent album title.
Secondly -- though all IMO -- it depends a little on what you want to achieve.
DAWs usually let you have stereo or mono tracks. If you want to record a stereo guitar track with Amplitube in it, then there is an extent to which you might want to do your panning in Amplitube (for convenience, if nothing else). As noted, some presets have big stereo effects built into them, and you can really hear the width. Your mono guitar signal goes in, magic occurs in the Amplitube signal paths, and out comes wide stereo sound. Ultimately you can then tweak the panning in Amplitube or your DAW or both, and as long as you like what you hear, you are good. (That's generally true, though.)
Alternatively, you want to record mono guitar. Traditionally, a lot of guitar is simply recorded in mono. Even people throwing up multiple mics on a single cab will often sum those down to mono before it hits tape (or hard disk, or whatever). Obviously, Amplitube lets you do this very handily with up to two mics on each of two different cabs within the plugin. You can then pan your output mono guitar sound on its track to wherever you want in the stereo field. If you record different mono guitar parts and pan them hard left and right:
voilà, big, wide, stereo guitars.
Of course, if you open up an Amplitube preset that was designed for stereo on a mono track ... Eh, I'm not actually sure what happens, though I
suspect it's just all summed down to mono and you never actually notice that the preset was built for stereo. Likewise, I suspect any effort to pan things in Amplitube might change the tone coming out of the plugin (like, if you have different amps or cabs on left or right, and you pan hard left or right, you are essentially turning down the stuff on the other side), but it will still (probably) be a mono track with a mono signal -- which, of course, you can then pan to wherever you want in the DAW.
I do not do a lot of stereo guitar recording, in the sense of taking a mono guitar signal and making it sound sufficiently different on different sides of the stereo image (probably delaying at least one side slightly) so that it actually sounds
stereo. I tend to record multiple mono parts and pan them differently.
However, if I
were recording a stereo (i.e. mono -> stereo) guitar part, I would probably
either leave the track in the DAW "centered", and mess with the different sounds for different sides of the stereo field within the gear modelled in the Amplitube plugin, or I would simply rout the mono guitar signal to different mono tracks in the DAW (which could then be panned however I wanted) and process them differently there, in their separate mono tracks, each with their own instances of the Amplitube plugin, etc. (In theory, you could expand that model to as many tracks as your DAW and computer could handle, processing them all differently.)
by scottlebrun44 » Tue Nov 05, 2019 3:18 am 
... "central mono".
