Harmonic distortion

Questions
1

Has anyone attempted to imitate harmonic distortion (I like to say saturation) with the method soft clip or something like it? There are papers that go into the maths of Transformers in Preamps bringing out 2nd or 3rd order harmonic distortion when overloaded. It’s the basis of high end analog sound. There’s all sorts of elements like hysteresis in the magnetic field. You can view it in action on a spetrogram. I feel these small points of saturation in real gear is what makes for layered more separated sound,

This is a great video by the former owner of api , he goes into all that.

2

I would say this is a job for Shaper. Basically from the help file, but slightly modified:

s.boot;

b = Buffer.alloc(s, 512, 1, { |buf| buf.chebyMsg([1, 0.2, 0.3]) });

(
{
    Shaper.ar(
        b,
        SinOsc.ar(300, 0, Line.kr(0, 1, 6)),
        0.5
    )
}.scope;
)

b.free;

I would also recommend checking out ShaperOS and ShaperOS2 from OversamplingOscillators. ShaperOS2 is a variable waveshaper with oversampling.

Sam

3

Some shaper variants:

1 Like
4

Cool, I shall check it out.