Diode

A soft-knee diode clipper with anti-aliased shaping (ADAA). It rounds the tops of a waveform the way a pair of clipping diodes does in a guitar pedal — gentle, slightly asymmetric grit that thickens leads, basses, and drums without the harsh fizz of a hard clip.

This is the standalone form of the Distort module's Diode mode, with one headline change: the Knee (diode hardness) is decoupled from drive. In the bundled Distort, the knee always sharpens as you turn up drive — they are locked together. Here Knee is its own knob (and CV input), so you can dial a soft, rounded clip at high gain, or a tight, gritty edge at low gain.

How it works

The input is normalized, gained by Drive, run through a polynomial diode curve whose corner width is set by Knee, then DC-blocked and scaled back out. The shaper uses antiderivative anti-aliasing, so it stays clean even when pushed hard. A small Bias term adds the even-harmonic asymmetry that gives diode clipping its characteristic warmth.

Controls

  • Drive — input gain into the clipper, 0..1. More drive means more of the

signal pushes past the diode corner and harder clipping. At 0 the module is a clean passthrough.

  • Knee — diode hardness, 0..1, independent of drive. Low values give

a wide, soft, rounded corner; high values give a tight, sharp corner with more bite. (At Knee == Drive the sound matches the bundled Distort's Diode mode.)

  • Bias — even-harmonic asymmetry, 0..1. 1 is the original diode warmth;

0 is symmetric. The bias term also softens as Knee rises.

  • Level — output makeup gain, 0..2. 1 is unity (and matches Distort);

push it to recover or add level after heavy clipping.

Inputs & outputs

  • In L / In R — audio to be clipped (±5 V range). Patch only In L and

it is clipped in mono, feeding both outputs; patch In R as well and each side gets its own clipper stage, sharing the same knobs.

  • Drv / Knee / Bias CV — control voltages that offset Drive, Knee, and Bias

respectively (±10 V → ±half the knob's range, then clamped). Patch an LFO or envelope here to animate the gain, hardness, or asymmetry.

  • Out L / Out R — the clipped audio, clamped to ±5 V. With a stereo input

and only Out L cabled, both channels are mixed down into it.

Tips

  • Keep Drive moderate and crank Knee up for a focused, biting edge that

doesn't get louder — the opposite of what Distort can do, since there the two are joined.

  • Modulate Knee CV with a slow envelope for a clip that opens and tightens

over a note's decay.

  • Pull Bias toward 0 for a cleaner, more symmetric fuzz; leave it at 1

for vintage diode warmth.

  • Use Level to make up gain after heavy clipping, or as a quick attenuator

feeding the next module.