Sine

A pitch-tracked sine oscillator whose Skew and Fold controls reshape phase before the sine lookup.

What it does #

Sine starts with the simplest smooth oscillator waveform. Skew moves the turning point of the phase mapping toward either side, and Fold adds further traversals, turning the sine into increasingly kinked and harmonically rich shapes.

Controls and ports #

Control	Label	Official description
skew	Skew	Tilts the waveshape from a sine toward a kinked sawtooth or ramp
fold	Fold	Wraps the waveshape back around, creating additional cycles

Practical uses #

• Leave Skew centered and Fold neutral for a clean fundamental tone.
• Modulate Skew or Fold to create timbral movement before using a filter or shaper.
• Externalize the phase with a Phasor and phase processors when you want custom oscillator warp modes.

Things to know #

• Skew and Fold alter phase traversal, so they create harmonics even though the final lookup is still a sine function.
• The upstream phase path can be treated as a 0-to-1 read address and processed independently in the Grid.
• Set Ratio to 0:1 and Phase In amount to 100 percent for external-only phase control; at ordinary ratios the patched signal is added to internal phase.
• The recovered implementation clamps the internal skew point to 0.001 through 0.999 to avoid division by zero.
• Phase modulation and feedback elsewhere in the patch can turn this clean source into a complex oscillator.

Technical details #

A high-confidence Nitro implementation candidate supports the technical summary, but the visible-module mapping remains inferred.

The mapped grid_sine4 body builds a piecewise linear phase path that rises to its turning point at clamped Skew k and falls afterward: conceptually u=p/k before k, then u=1-(p-k)/(1-k). It centers and scales that path by Fold before calling Bitwig's optimized sineWF5 helper. The oscillator advances at pitch times ratio, accepts trigger resets and additive phase modulation, and processes opposing stereo detune when enabled.

Nitro port	Type
pitchValue	InputAudioPortType
pitchOffset	InputAudioPortType
numerator	InputValuePortType
denominator	InputValuePortType
triggerIn	InputAudioPortType
phaseIn	InputAudioPortType
phaseMod	InputAudioPortType
stereo	InputValuePortType
formant	InputAudioPortType
wrap	InputAudioPortType
detune	InputAudioPortType
bipolar	InputValuePortType
out	OutputAudioPortType

Open questions #

• Measure the exact visible Skew/Fold scaling, sine phase orientation, and helper approximation error.
• Render spectra and reset-boundary tests for extreme Fold and audio-rate modulation.

Version and sources #

Checked against Bitwig Studio 6.0.6. This page combines Bitwig's module metadata, the existing Grid course and guides, and Nitro analysis where the mapping is strong enough to support a technical statement.

Related material #

• Grid Modules course reference
• Oscillator Warp Modes in Bitwig for Cool Sounds

Return to Bitwig Grid Modules or the Grid Modules course lesson.