Why does my supersaw disappear on my phone?

What mono does to a stereo sound

A stereo signal can be described as mid, what the two channels share, and side, what differs between them. Summing to mono keeps the mid and removes the side completely. A sound that lives mostly in the side signal has little left.

A correlation meter shows the risk before you hear it. At +1 the channels are identical and nothing is lost in mono. Near 0 the sound is wide and loses some level. Below 0 the channels are working against each other and the sound drops sharply or vanishes.

Why supersaws are prone to it

A supersaw is several sawtooth oscillators detuned against each other and panned apart. The detuning makes the phase between left and right drift constantly. A chorus, a stereo widener or a Haas delay on top adds more side signal and less mid.

Fixes

• Reduce the stereo spread of the unison voices. Half the width keeps most of the size and far more of the mono level.
• Layer a mono saw in the centre under the wide patch, so there is always something left to sum.
• Keep the low octave mono. Low frequencies cancel most audibly.
• Take wideners off it. A widener and a supersaw together are the usual cause.

The other reason: a phone has no bass

A phone speaker reproduces very little below about 300 Hz. A supersaw whose weight is in its low octave sounds thin there even when it is mono-safe. Add a layer an octave up, or some saturation, so the part has harmonics the speaker can play.

In Zammoth

The engineer measures stereo correlation for the whole mix and band by band, and flags a mix that will lose level in mono. The Utility device has a Mono key for checking, a Bass Mono switch with a crossover from 50 to 500 Hz, and a lamp that reads MONO SAFE and turns to PHASE when the correlation falls too low. WOOLLY, the built-in synth, has a unison of 1 to 8 voices on each oscillator. See the Utility reference.