Even Harmonics Waveform

This is the waveform that contains all even harmonics, created in Audacity with C5 (523.25 Hz) as the fundamental. The sample wave contains the first 20 even harmonics (each with 1/n amplitude). It does alias a bit above C5, but down pitches nicely.

I got interested in it because you would think it would be one of the standard synth waves, given that sawtooth contains all odd and even harmonics, and square and triangular waves contain all odd harmonics. But this wave is more complex than the others, looking a bit like synth wave 159, CZ DoubleSine.

I also got interested in it in light of the discussions about the harshness of the XW distortion, and reading that “warm” analog distortion creates even harmonics, as opposed to “harsh” digital distortion which creates odd harmonics. To this end, I used Audacity's Limiter effect to clip the wave at various levels, thereby introducing some, hopefully “warm”, distortion. The soft clipping method was used.

So the User Wave in this download contains five splits as follows:

• Split 1 : the unclipped Even Harmonics Waveform
  
• Split 2 : soft clipping to -2.5 dB
  
• Split 3 : soft clipping to -5 dB
  
• Split 4 : soft clipping to -7.5 dB
  
• Split 5 : soft clipping to -10 dB
  

You can turn each split on or off by setting its volume to zero or 127 (or some other value). You can also have multiple splits playing, detuned to taste. You can also run them through the Distortion DSP, but this probably starts introducing odd harmonics, especially at higher gain settings.