Waldorf pulse 2 User Manual

Waldorf pulse 2 User Manual Manual pdf 47 page image

Sound Synthesis Basics47 Pulse 2 User ManualSound Synthesis BasicsOscillators IntroductionThe oscillator is the first building block of a synthesizer.It delivers the signal that is transformed by all othercomponents of the synthesizer. In the early days ofelectronic synthesis, engineers found that most realacoustic instrument waveforms can be reproduced byusing abstracted electronic versions of these waveforms.They weren´t the first who came to that conclusion, butthey were the first in recreating them electronically andbuilding them into a machine that could be used com-mercially. What they implemented into his synthesizerwere the still well-known waveforms sawtooth andsquare. For sure, this is only a minimal selection of theendless variety of waveforms, but the Waldorf Pulse 2gives you exactly these waveforms at hand.Now, you probably know how these waveforms lookand sound, but the following chapter gives you a shortintroduction into the deeper structure of these wave-forms.The Sawtooth WaveThe Sawtooth wave is the most popular synthesizerwaveform. It consists of all harmonics in which themagnitude of each harmonic descends by the factor ofits position. This means that the first harmonic (the fun-damental) has full magnitude, the second harmonic hashalf magnitude, the third harmonic has a third magnitu-de and so on. The following picture shows how theindividual harmonics build up the sawtooth wave: