4) What is a Wave Shaper?

In the last post we spoke a little about how transfer functions and wave shapers work. Today we will dig in a little deeper into how wave shapers like ORANGE CLIP work.

A wave shaper is a clipper, and a clipper is a wave shaper. They are essentially the same thing. It is an audio effect that changes the signal by applying a mathematical shaping function. What? In my mind, a more appropriate term would be "amplitude shaper" because it is changing gain in real-time, but nobody says that. A wave shaper changes the amplitude of the peaks instantaneously with a mathematical equation. Remember exponential functions in math class? Yeah, it's something similar to that. 

When a traditional transfer function is used as a display for a processor, like above, it is assumed that the wave shaping is symmetric; meaning it is affecting the positive and negative side of the wave form in the same way. Not all wave shapers are symmetric, but Orange Clip is.

When we look at a waveform in a DAW (image above) we see both the positive and negative side of the waveform. Essentially when the speaker pushes out and when it pulls in. A traditional transfer function only shows one side of the waveform. If we were to show both sides of the waveform, the wave shaper display would look like the orange line on image (2). The dotted line represents the input and the orange line represents the wave shaped output.  

For the image above, I super imposed Orange Clip's transfer function over the positive and negative side of a waveform to emphasize the concept. 

That's just scratching the surface of transfer functions and wave shapers, but it should give you a better idea of what is happening when you watch that white ball bounce along the orange line of Orange Clip.

Next time we will go a little deeper on ORANGE processing. 

Be well,

Ryan Schwabe

Grammy-nominated and multi-platinum mixing & mastering engineer

Founder of Schwabe Digital

Designer of Gold Clip & Orange Clip

p.s. If you haven't already, you can buy or rent-to-own ORANGE CLIP right here.