Panning, Width, and Mono-Compatible Stereo Imaging

Whether your track ends up on a club PA whose sub array sums to mono, a phone speaker, or a Bluetooth box in someone’s kitchen, most listeners never hear your stereo field as you built it. This module’s whole task is engineering a mix that sounds thrillingly wide on headphones yet loses nothing when everything collapses to a single channel — the difference between a bedroom mix and one that translates.

Start supported: take a small electronic or band arrangement and place the non-negotiables first — kick, snare, bass, and lead centred, for mono survival and equal woofer loading. Then choose a stance for everything else, decisive hard-left/centre/right placement versus even spread, and commit. With the static image set, widen deliberately: try a real or fake double-track for organic width, then a Haas one-sided delay to hear its lopsided, comb-filtering character, then Mid/Side gain to widen surgically. Route the riskier wideners onto reverb and delay returns rather than the dry parts, so mono summing weakens only the effect. Throughout, drill the mono flip until it is reflexive — sweeping pans in mono, listening for the ~3 dB centre lift, using a channel-swap check to expose off-centre leads, and scanning for Big Mono — pseudo-stereo sources piled at the extremes that produce false width with no real imaging. These recurring checks are the part-task drills that make the unsupported capstone feasible.

The required atoms gate the capstone directly: you cannot pan, widen, or verify it without them, and spotting Big Mono — pseudo-stereo sources piled at the extremes — is an explicit pass/fail criterion backed by the panning-big-mono-problem atom. The supporting atoms deepen the same physics elsewhere: phase alignment when layering drum samples or sub-synths, deliberately narrow club mixes, and the vinyl-era elliptical EQ that explains why mono bass became law.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

stereo-panning

d1 $ pan (slow 2 sine) # sound "hh*8"

_{tidal-0037 · CC0}

SinOsc s => Pan2 p => dac; -0.7 => p.pan;

_{chuck-0042 · MIT}

sub-bass

osc 27.5 >> audio

_{punctual-0002 · CC0-1.0}

synth :subpulse, note: :e1, sustain: 0.4, amp: 1.4

_{sonicpi-0016 · CC0}

stereo-widening

d1 $ jux rev $ sound "hh*8"

_{tidal-0036 · CC0}

SinOsc s => Chorus c => dac; c.modFreq(0.5); c.modDepth(0.02);

_{chuck-0040 · MIT}

mono-bass

mono (saw [110,220,330]) >> audio

_{punctual-0013 · CC0-1.0}