“Bias,” “Symmetry,” and “Offset” is just a second signal being sent into the wavefolder.
Here is how I would set it up in your patch.
my-weird-wavefolder-with-bias.audulus (12.2 KB)
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Bastl reminds us that you can run modulation through wave folders for interesting effects as well.
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FWIW, Todd Barton says that on the Buchla 261e, symmetry morphs a sine to a square wave and high order morphs sine to “spike wave”.
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Just happened an interesting article about the wavefolding in the Music Easel.
See the interesting comment by Verbos in the page comments about the 148 version of the oscillator:
mark verbos said…
The 148 makes the odd harmonics using a circuit that folds a triangle wave much like the circuit in the 259 or 208. It’s not a circuit that you just send in a sine wave and get out all the harmonics though. It doubles the triangles using a full wave rectifier and multiplies by 3, 5 , 7 and 9 using wave folders. Then converts all of those to sines individually.
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Given the interesting way that the Buchla 261e’s wavefolding kind of sweeps up as harmonics are added rather than just piling on more harmonics – I am thinking it would be interesting to put together a wavefolder that as you turn it up change changes the frequency of the function that is doing the folding. So that there are three or four way points that results in a sort of harmonic sweep that results in high order harmonics without becoming as “dense” as typical wavefolders.
Not quite sure how to do that efficiently. Food for thought.
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Thanks for posting that!
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I made a wave shaper/folder thing to use with my additive patches recently, and I am not sure what exactly it would be classified as, but I like how it sounds when you have a bunch of sine or triangle waves converging and then running through it. I call it the Harmonic Introduction Module. It is made up of 3 stages of spline nodes that are cross faded into the previous stage’s output.
Harmonic Introduction Module.audulus (7.1 KB)
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Dude, awesome. I’m glad you liked that module. That patch you made was really well put together! To me it sounds like a few guitarists joined a group of violinists and cellists, and together as the newly formed string quartet, they were alternating parts with a full orchestra.
I opened that one up and all things I was trying to accomplish this evening just straight FADED into the background as the music took over, and before I knew it, 20 minutes had passed as I zoned on it. Man that was SO good 
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Great patch. I liked the orchestral vibe and the key change was a nice touch.
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While watching the Barton video, I realized that perhaps I’ve been approaching wave folding from the wrong direction. I’ve been inserting the wave folder after the oscillator core and before the envelope/VCA that provides the amplitude dynamics. If the envelope/VCA is before the folder, the harmonic content introduced by the folder will vary as the oscillator gain changes. In order to investigate this I added a linear/exponential VCA to the RCWG before the folder. With the gain at max and no amp input it behaves as before.
Ridiculously Complex Waveform Generator V4.0 demo.audulus (456.3 KB)
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