Sound Synthesis Basics
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Pulse 2 User Manual
Sound Synthesis Basics
Oscillators Introduction
The oscillator is the first building block of a synthesizer.
It delivers the signal that is transformed by all other
components of the synthesizer. In the early days of
electronic synthesis, engineers found that most real
acoustic instrument waveforms can be reproduced by
using abstracted electronic versions of these waveforms.
They weren´t the first who came to that conclusion, but
they were the first in recreating them electronically and
building them into a machine that could be used com-
mercially. What they implemented into his synthesizer
were the still well-known waveforms sawtooth and
square. For sure, this is only a minimal selection of the
endless variety of waveforms, but the Waldorf Pulse 2
gives you exactly these waveforms at hand.
Now, you probably know how these waveforms look
and sound, but the following chapter gives you a short
introduction into the deeper structure of these wave-
forms.
The Sawtooth Wave
The Sawtooth wave is the most popular synthesizer
waveform. It consists of all harmonics in which the
magnitude of each harmonic descends by the factor of
its position. This means that the first harmonic (the fun-
damental) has full magnitude, the second harmonic has
half magnitude, the third harmonic has a third magnitu-
de and so on. The following picture shows how the
individual harmonics build up the sawtooth wave:
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