Is there a way to random change the pan of a scatter instrument every time it plays a sound on its list, when the Max and Min Scatter Distance are set both to 0, on a 2D sound?
This last part of the question is the essential one because I know that scatter instruments have a volume attenuation problem when working with 2D sounds, right? But, the only way I think it would randomly pan the sounds it plays (in its list) in space is if the mix and max scatter distance are different from zero, right?
I though that creating a random pan on the track itself (right click track Pan, add modulation, random) would solve this, but doesn’t, because it only randomizes the sound when it starts playing, for example in the beginning of a level (keeping the same position for all sounds that are played on the scattered instrument throughout the hole loop time/playback).
What I’m trying to do is to use scatter instruments to randomly play and pan sounds (birds singing, for example) for the ambience of a side-scrolled game. The ambience sounds are all 2D.
First, remove every entry from your scatterer instrument’s playlist.
Add one event instrument to the playlist.
Inside the nested event, add an asynchronous multi instrument to the timeline.
Take all the items you removed from the scatterer instrument’s playlist in step 1, and add them to the multi instrument’s playlist.
Add a random modulator to the panner of the nested event’s track.
As for why this works: As you’ve noticed, random modulators on properties of an event randomize their values once at the start of each event instance. When a scatterer instrument spawns an event instrument from its playlist, it creates a new instance of the associated nested event. Because this means that each new spawned sound is a new event instance, each of those spawned sounds can have different random panning.
It looks so obvious now, but I didn’t think about this. Maybe because I’m still not used to use “events inside events”. It’s such a powerful resource, I need to use it more so I can understand its possibilities better.
I came up with another solution using an unused sound in my project and Pan modulation via sidechain, that can be useful in other situations, because makes the affected sound(s) “randomly” swipe from the side to the center, creating an interesting movement.