Stereo Merge

A stereo constructor that combines separate left, right, mid, and side component inputs.

What it does #

Stereo Merge builds one stereo signal from channel-oriented and center/difference-oriented components. Left and Right place material on their respective sides, Mid contributes common center content, and Side contributes opposite-polarity difference content across the stereo pair.

Controls and ports #

Control	Label	Official description
left	Left	Signal placed on the left of the stereo output
right	Right	Signal placed on the right of the stereo output
mid	Mid	Signal placed in the middle of the stereo output
side	Side	Signal placed on the sides of the stereo output

Practical uses #

• Reassemble components produced by Stereo Split after processing the center and sides differently.
• Add a mono bass or lead through Mid while keeping ambience or modulation in Side.
• Construct deliberate left-only and right-only control or audio patterns inside one stereo cable.

Things to know #

• Grid stereo tools are useful for pitch, phase, gate, and modulation signals as well as conventional audio.
• Mid means content shared by left and right; Side means a left/right difference represented with opposite polarity.
• Combining all four inputs can add overlapping content and raise level; they are contributions, not four mutually exclusive modes.
• The exact normalization and channel extraction applied to stereo-valued component inputs have not been recovered.

Technical details #

No Nitro implementation has been confirmed for this visible module. The behavior is described conservatively from module metadata and editorial research.

No exact Nitro body has been identified. A conventional normalized model would add Left to the left lane, Right to the right lane, and reconstruct M/S as L += M+S, R += M-S, with some implementation-specific scale factor. That equation is an explanatory model only: Bitwig's precise 0.5 factors, treatment of stereo-valued Left/Right/Mid/Side inputs, and summing headroom require measurement before an exact formula can be published.

Open questions #

• Measure each input independently with asymmetric stereo constants to recover the complete routing matrix and scale factors.
• Test Split-to-Merge identity, Merge-to-Split round trips, polarity, clipping/headroom, and mono cable behavior.
• Determine parameter-free latency, voice scope, and whether the module exists outside the current Nitro image.

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
• Stereo Signals in the Grid are special

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