Rhodes V-Pan, free through January, offers versatile, musical panning

Rhodes – yeah, that Rhodes – is giving away the V-Pan panning plug-in they’ve just introduced. The hardware-style panning borrowed from Rhodes’ Vari-Pan circuitry is worth adding to your arsenal as a versatile auto-panner. Week of Free continues…

You might already have an auto-panner in your DAW or synth environment, so what sets this one apart? They’ve created an authentic emulation of the Vari-Pan section on the Rhodes MK8 electric piano, both in controls and sound. This behaves more like a hardware auto-panner would than a from-scratch digital auto-panner, and I did A/B it against my go-to Apple and Ableton choices (or just wiring up an auto-panner in a modular). You get some slightly different curve behaviors and a warmer sound, with the trade-off being you can’t drive this as far into higher audio rates as you could a digital option.

And through the end of January, it’s free. After that, they’ll charge a fee for it, but the main aim here is to serve as a teaser to their full V-RACK, a new multi-effects plug-in based on Rhodes keyboards. I just started testing that now, but gave the V-PAN a quick spin first.

There’s a lot of functionality in that little space. (There’s a draggable resizable UI, though it’s limited in how large you can make it):

Modeled on the MK8 Vari-Pan circuit
L/R LED indicators (which are in fact pretty responsive)
Super-slow to audio rate range, deep depth
Parameter readout for the faders (though not the knobs for some reason?)
Multiple waveform shapes
Slew and Smooth
BPM sync

You can use this for subtle shifting effects and depth, all the way up to chorus and even ring-mod effects at audio rate. And you certainly don’t have to use it only on Rhodes-ish sounds – it’s great on other synths and textures, too, or even drums.

Having this warmer sound and much smoother Slew and Smooth options, plus those additional waveforms, winds up being really useful – I found I could dial in some sounds I couldn’t get out of Ableton’s Auto Pan, for instance.

All the parameters can also be automated. (See Live here) Since these are musical across the range, they’re a good fit for live use and controller mapping, too.

Have a listen to how the ranges sound – and how different this is from Auto Pan, by example. (This is a really quick impromptu demo, but I think you’ll agree it’s useful to have both!)

(A quickly-constructed patch in AAS-developed Ableton Collision is the sound source here.)