So what is the WaveFolder? Well, its a waveshaper. And its fully voltage controllable. That's what makes this one different. It consists of five parts:

1. The Soft Clipper. This is a VCA stage with the added bonus of soft clipping the output when the gain gets over a certain level. Yes, you can do soft clipping with a 3080 OTA, but this circuit clips the output, not the input, so as the VCA gain increases so does the distortion. But if you are feeling wimpy, you can use it as a normal VCA if you want. You can use this to turn triangle waves into warm sounding square waves.

2. The Clamper. The next part of the chain is a clamper. This prevents the output from going above or below a preset limit. The limit is voltage controllable and is called the Threshold. Triangle waveforms can be given real beef with this function. A switch or external voltage selects whether the signal is to be clipped below or above the threshold voltage. Use another VCO's output to control the polarity of the clamper. Crazy!


3. The Clipper. What the Clamper bites off, the clipper returns. The Clip Out is the bit that gets chopped by the clamper circuit. So if you put a 5V peak triangle waveform into the Clamper, and set the threshold to be 0V. The Clamper output will give you the top half of the waveform, while the clipper will give you the bottom half. Or vice versa depending on the polarity switch or CV.

4. The Folder. The Wavefolder's fourth section is based around a four quadrant multiplier. Here the Clip out and Clamp out are mixed together. However, the clip output may be added or subtracted from the clamped signal. A pot and an external CV sets the mix ratio and polarity. Again, consider the 5V triangle waveform. With the Fold pot set to 0, you get the plain Clamped signal at the main output. Turn the Fold pot clockwise and the clipped signal will return to create the original signal once more. But keep turning it, and the clipped signal is now bigger then the original. Your triangle becomes a harmonic monster! Now turn the pot the other way. The clipped signal gets subtracted from the clamped signal. You can get full wave rectification, thus your triangle becomes another triangle at twice the frequency. Multiplication. Turn it up further and more harmioncs come in.

5. The Amp. The last stage is a simple x10 amplifier. The wavefolder can clip very accurately down to small levels if you want, so you need a good amplifier to bring it up to a decent level again. However, you can deliberately overload this stage to give you even more mayhem. Great for blowing holes in your next module.