How does a synth work?

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are proceeding with our overview about synths with a new article, in which we will go a little bit more in depth on how they work.

As we have already seen in our first article on the subject, synths start from a wave, which can have different forms (it can be a sine wave, a sawtooth wave, a square wave, a triangle wave and so on), and every form with have a different sound, for example one same note according to the wave type can sound a bit more nasal, a bit smoother, a bit more harsh and so on.

This is the basic building block of a synth sound.

Frequency modulation is the thing that happens when you use one wave to modulate another wave, meaning that for example we can put a slower wave (one that is so slow that is not audible, it doesn't create a note but it works only as a mean to modulate our original wave), which we will call oscillator (in this case a slow frequency one), to modulate our initial sound, which is a note (ore a serie of notes) played using the wave we began with.

What does this interaction do? For example our original sound can obtain an oscillating, pulsating effect, the speed of which depends on the speed we set the oscillator to.

At the beginning of this chain we can link a third oscillator, let's imagine a super slow wave, slow to the point of sounding basically like the following oscillation effect is slowing down; we can add several oscillators, according to how our synth is done, and each one with modify our sound furthermore.

So far we have talked about slow frequency waves, but we can actually modulate our initial sound also with waves fast enough to create a note, for example if our first wave was a sine one we can add a different type, like a square one, and see the result.

The initial wave is also called "carrier", while the oscillator that modifies it is also called "modulator", and the way they interact is set by a control called "ratio" which sets the speed of the modulator, and there are certain proportions between the two that are particularly pleasant to hear, for example a ratio 1:1 (which means the 2 waves have the same speed), or 2:1 (which means that the speed of the modulator is twice as fast as the one of the carrier makes the operators (another name to call all these modules that interact among each other) sound good, while the further we move towards more complex mathematical ratios, the more the sound will get weird 

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