I’ve been looking at the theoretical principles that govern the voltage-controlled amplifier (VCA) recently and came across some simple VCA designs that caught my attention. A common technique involves a JFET and an opamp to achieve VCA type operation by using the JFET as a voltage-controlled resistor somewhere in the input path. I’ve seen a good deal of these circuits out there, but I had trouble getting good simulation results from what I had seen. I cam across an article by Rod Elliot of Elliot Sound Products which covered some nice history and interesting discussion of the VCA in general. After going over the information there, I came up with this design based on some of the more basic designs presented.

One of the things I’ve been most interested in is trying to accomplish this with a single supply which is common in most stompbox setups. In the schematic, there’s an emitter-follower stage just to act as a buffer for the input signal followed by an inverting opamp stage. To make this work, both C1 and C2 are required to effectively AC couple both input signals (Vin and Vctl) to the opamp stage. There’s an RC network that is supposed to tame the distortion in the output by taking a portion of the output and connecting it to the input of the J201. The article explains this in decent detail. In simulation, the it seems to smooth out the non-linearity of the JFET as Vctl changes. Using the J201, LTSpice gives a decent linear-like response over a range of around 500 mV (0 to -500 mV at the input) and operates decently with a 500 mVp signal.

For use with an LFO, I found that the best results happen with a slight negative voltage offset and a signal who’s amplitude peaks at 0V (i.e. 250 mV sinusoidal signal with a -250 mV offset). Of course, this is all highly dependent on the threshold voltage of the J201 which can range from -0.3 V to -1.5 V according to the Fairchild datasheet. It will be interesting to see the results of this circuit on a breadboard.

References:
[1] Gray, P. (2009). Analysis and design of analog integrated circuits. New York: Wiley.

[2] Sound.whsites.net. (2017). VCAs. [online] Available at: http://sound.whsites.net/articles/vca-techniques.html [Accessed 1 Sep. 2017].