TONIQ Pan — full panel mockup

Full panel mockup · Pan v2's real parameters

TONIQ Pan

Displays given the height they were short of, zone selection folded into the head of the knob bay, and that bay dropped to the darkest plate on the chassis so the lit rings carry it. Controls map to z<n>_<pos|width|mod>_<base|depth|phase>, z<n>_center, split1/2, resolution, output, drywet, auto_key — loaded with the shipping defaults.

Toniq Pan
Key
Snap
A0 — C3  ·  28 notes
132°

The cell

Every control is an elongated hexagon — an ommatidium, cut from the same tessellation as the facets on the knobs. The rule that keeps it from becoming decoration: anything you touch is a cell, anything you read is a rectangle. The faceplate and the displays stay square, so shape alone tells you what will respond to a click. Cells carry no outline either — a 1px ring cannot follow a chamfer, and the silhouette against its plate is the edge.

Ten things removed

“Res”, “Detect” and “Zone” labelled segments that already name themselves. The key readout and the Auto button were two controls for one decision, now one. “Dep” appeared four times under sliders whose shape says bipolar. The ? moved onto the wordmark, where About always lives, and the licence chip moved with it — a permanently-lit “Activated” is a status nobody needs on every session.

One grey, three lights

All three plugins share this chassis — a true neutral, R = G = B at every step — so the only colour anywhere is the zones, and the zone ramp is what tells you which plugin you are in: cyanorchid here, teal → lime in Delay, ember → yellow-hot in Reverb. Same construction each time: one hue family, lightness always climbing with pitch, so a bright key means a high note everywhere.

Colour means one thing

The zone ramp means pitch zone — low, mid, high — and nothing else is allowed to borrow it. The top bar and mode strip run monochrome, and so do Output and Dry / Wet, which belong to no zone. The only exception is Record, which is grey at rest and turns red while it is actually recording, because that is a state you must be able to spot without reading.

Things that cross the seam

Two elements refuse to stay inside their plate: the zone tray flows out of the bottom of the knob bay, and Output and Dry / Wet ride up over the same boundary from the other side. Both cast shadow onto the layer they land on. Without something crossing, a stack of plates can still read as one flat image with lines drawn on it — these settle it.

Four plate tones

The knob bay is the darkest plate on the chassis, so the lit file rings and the zone colour are the only bright things in it — the knobs stop competing with their own background. Around it, the top bar sits mid, the mode strip and footer recede, and the display is deeper still. Buttons take their gradient from whichever plate they sit on, so a control reads as raised on all four.

The keyboard went dark

Graphite naturals with a hard top bevel and a real 2 px gap, near-black sharps casting shadow across them. Four octaves at the bottom — C2 to B5, which covers a guitar in standard and drop tunings without moving the rail. A sounding note lights from beneath and the key sinks.

The placement strip

One dot per sounding note at the position it is actually panned to, computed from the same maths the DSP reads. Switch to the Low zone and turn Centre: the constellation hinges around the pivot note. Pan is the only plugin here whose output is a position, and it currently has no way to show one.

Still missing on purpose

About and licensing now live behind the wordmark — click it. Neither is wired here, because Pan v2 has no licensing UI at all today where Delay and Reverb have eight references each. Putting them behind one entry point rather than two panel-level controls is also how they stop costing space on every session.