Does it simply clip the top of the waveform as straightforward as I imagine it? I figured such hard clipping would add more harmonics than the triangle wave has to begin with. Or does the diode circuit function more like a nonlinear low-pass filter - nonlinearly adds some lower frequency harmonic content but removes the upper overtones that made the wave orginally triangular?
Yeah, more the latter – it rounds out the triangle wave. Here’s a deep dive into emulating the 909 circuits using DSP (reaktor). The guy in this video goes over a lot of this stuff with diagrams, etc.
I do wish Elektron would make a dual VCO snare machine with a dedicated detune control. Or if they could expose some tooling in an SDK or otherwise for making custom machines, that’d be even better.
I can try to post some audio samples of my 909 snare tinkering in a bit.