Synthesiser
A synthesiser is a sound genarator which creates its own sound.With a sythesiser you can create different sound waves and manipulate them to your liking.
The different waves you can create our:
- Square waves - looks like a (near) perfect square, produces a reedy, hollow sound.
- Triangle waves -unsurprisingly shaped like a triangle, this sounds somewhere in between a saw wave and a sine wave.
- Sine wave -a smooth rising and falling shape (like a horizontal ‘S'), this produces a mild, soft tone.
- Pulse wave-a variation on the above, the pulse wave is half as wide as a square wave, and has the unique ability to have its width modulated
- Saw Wave -shaped like the teeth on a saw blade, this produces a very common sharp, biting tone.
The synth we have used is analogue and digital which both can be connected to the computer by using Midi cables.The more modern synths tend to be digital and can be used through music software which in our task is cubase.With a synth you can use a LFO (Low frequency oscillator) which allows you to lower the frequency of the sound wave.
You an also use different filters on a synth which allows you to filter out part of the sound, leaving you with a reduced portion of it, which sounds very different to the whole portion. The main control on any filter is the filter frequency, or ‘cutoff’, which is the key point at which all frequencies are cut off – be it all frequencies which are above, below, in between, or outside of the cutoff point. Common filter types include:
• Low
Pass – the most common type of filter, the low pass allows all frequencies
below the cutoff point to pass through.
• High
Pass – the opposite of the low pass filter, the high pass filter allows all
frequencies above the cutoff point to pass through.
• Band
Pass – allows a band on frequencies to pass through in the center, but stops
all frequencies outside of this band.
Band Notch/Reject – so called because it looks like a
not
