Sound Synthesis Basics
25 Rocket User´s 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 com-
ponents of the synthesizer. In the early days of electronic
synthesis, engineers found that most real acoustic instru-
ment 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 commercially. 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 wave-
forms, but the Waldorf Rocket 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 intro-
duction into the deeper structure of these waveforms.
The Sawtooth Wave
The Sawtooth wave is the most popular synthesizer
waveform. It consists of all harmonics in which the mag-
nitude of each harmonic descends by the factor of its
position. This means that the first harmonic (the funda-
mental) has full magnitude, the second harmonic has half
magnitude, the third harmonic has a third magnitude and
so on. The following picture shows how the individual
harmonics build up the sawtooth wave:
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