Refractor

A texture effect that turns a signal's own loudness into a window onto its past. Refractor records the incoming audio continuously, then uses the live input's instantaneous amplitude as a pointer into that history — so what you hear is the present moment refracted through an earlier one. Dynamic material smears, stutters, and bends back on itself: somewhere between a granular delay and a self-playing wavetable.

How it works

The wavetable is the past. Every sample, the input is written into a stereo ring buffer and its amplitude is mapped to a position inside a short slice of that history — loud peaks scrub to one moment, quiet passages to another. Two neighbouring slices are read at once and crossfaded as the slice plays out, sliding the window forward. Left and right scrub from their own history lanes, so a mono input stays mono while a decorrelated stereo input opens into genuine width.

Controls

  • Slice — the length of the past-audio window, as a tempo-synced division from 1/16 up to dotted 2 bars. Short slices give fast, grainy stutter; long slices reach back for smeared, washed-out textures.
  • Offs — how far back in time the window sits, in whole slice-lengths (0–7). Higher values pull the refracted material from deeper in the past — more distant, echo-like.
  • Mix — wet/dry blend. Refractor is replace-style and defaults fully wet; back it off to blend the effect under the dry signal.
  • Scrub — how hard the input's amplitude drives the read pointer through the past. At low settings (10%) only loud peaks nudge the window, so the effect stays subtle and tracks transients; crank it toward 200% and even quiet material sweeps the whole slice, going twitchy and unstable. The default 50% scrubs exactly as the original effect did.
  • Clock — where the tempo comes from. Ext measures the pulses arriving at the clock input, which is how this module has always worked. Song follows the timeline's tempo directly, with no cable at all. Int runs at its own speed, set by the BPM field beside it. One thing worth knowing: in Ext the divisions are relative to whatever you clock it with, so feeding it sixteenths makes every label four times faster than it reads. In Int and Song the module knows what a quarter note is, so the labels mean exactly what they say.
  • BPM — the tempo for Int. In Song it greys out and shows you the timeline's tempo instead; in Ext it greys out too, because the cable is in charge.

Inputs & outputs

  • inL / inR — the stereo audio to refract. Its amplitude is both the source recorded into history and the control that scrubs through it.
  • Slice / Offs / Mix / Scrub CV — voltage control over each knob; patch an LFO or envelope to sweep the window length, drag the reflection back through time, fade the wet blend, or modulate the scrub depth automatically.
  • clock — a quarter-note clock; the slice divisions lock to its tempo while the Clock control is on Ext. Unpatched, Refractor sits at 120 BPM.
  • reset — restarts the slice ramp on a rising edge, snapping the crossfade back to the start of its window.
  • outL / outR — the refracted stereo result.

Tips

  • Feed it transients. The input's amplitude envelope is the scrub control, so percussion, plucks, and dynamic phrases move the most — steady drones barely budge.
  • Sync clock to your project tempo, then sweep Offs to drag the reflection from "tight echo" toward "ghost of three bars ago."
  • Send a decorrelated stereo signal for real width — each channel reads its own past.