Pan

A stereo-position control using Bitwig's hybrid quadratic pan law.

What it does #

Pan changes the relative gains of the left and right channels so a signal appears farther left, centered, or farther right. It operates on any Grid signal carried as a stereo pair, not only final audio.

Controls and ports #

Control	Label	Official description
placement	Placement	Stereo panning position for the incoming signal

Practical uses #

• Place an oscillator, noise layer, or effect return in the stereo field.
• Modulate Placement slowly for movement or with a Voice Stack spread signal for unison width.
• Pan modulation signals differently when the left and right lanes should drive later stereo processing independently.

Things to know #

• Panning is gain redistribution; it does not add delay, room simulation, or inter-channel crossfeed.
• A stereo source keeps its two channel lanes, so Pan is not identical to placing a mono source into a stereo field.
• The exact Grid-specific body uses a hybrid curve whose hard-side gain differs from its center gain.
• Fast modulation can act like amplitude modulation on each channel and create sidebands.

Technical details #

A high-confidence Nitro implementation candidate supports the technical summary, but the visible-module mapping remains inferred.

The exact-name grid/mix/grid_pan body forms p = <1-pan, 1+pan> and computes out = in * p*(1.18-0.18*p) independently for the two stereo lanes. At pan 0 both multipliers are 1. At either extreme one lane reaches zero while the other receives the curve's hard-side gain. The similarly named generic mix/pan helper uses an algebraically related quadratic law, but the Grid-specific body is the stronger visible-module match.

Nitro port	Type
in	InputAudioPortType
pan	InputAudioPortType
out	OutputAudioPortType

Open questions #

• Measure the displayed pan range, hard-side gain, center-to-edge loudness, and handling of already-stereo material.
• Test values outside the nominal bipolar range, parameter smoothing, audio-rate modulation, and mono compatibility.
• Confirm whether any visible wrapper compensation occurs before or after grid_pan.

Version and sources #

Checked against Bitwig Studio 6.0.6. This page combines Bitwig's module metadata, the existing Grid course and guides, and Nitro analysis where the mapping is strong enough to support a technical statement.

Related material #

• Grid Modules course reference

Return to Bitwig Grid Modules or the Grid Modules course lesson.