Shape the wave itself

About 8 minutes

You will change the shape of a tone's wave in three ways: a pulse width on a square wave, a custom wave drawn from its harmonics and a straight slide. Each gives a tone colour the four ordinary waves can't.

Start from nothing

Open a blank sound (opens in a new tab)

1. A plain square wave

  1. Press + Tone and set Wave to square.
  2. Set Pitch to 330, Length to 0.5 and Volume to 0.2. Play: a hollow, buzzy tone.

Hear step 1 (opens in a new tab)

2. Pulse width: thinner and more nasal

A square wave spends half of each cycle high and half low. The Pulse width slider, which appears while the wave is square, changes that split. Narrow pulses sound thin and nasal, like many classic game leads.

  1. Set Pulse width to 0.15 and play.
  2. Drag it slowly between 0.05 and 0.5 to hear it fatten. 0.5 is the ordinary square.
  3. 0.1 and 0.9 sound the same: the shape is just flipped.

Hear step 2 (opens in a new tab)

3. A custom wave from its harmonics

Every pitched sound is a stack of harmonics: the pitch itself, then an octave above, then a fifth above that, and so on. The ordinary waves are fixed recipes. A custom wave lets you mix your own.

  1. Set Wave to custom. Eight bars appear, one for each harmonic.
  2. Bar 1 is the pitch itself. Raise it to the top, then set bar 2 to about half, bar 3 to a third, bar 4 to nothing and bar 5 to a fifth. Play: a woody, organ-like tone.
  3. Now try bars 1 and 3 only for a hollow, clarinet-like sound, or a lone high bar for a thin whistle. Moving a bar and pressing Play is the whole technique.

Hear the custom wave (opens in a new tab)

The bars start as a sawtooth-like recipe when you pick custom, so you always begin from something that sounds good. Choosing another wave brings the ordinary one back.

4. A straight slide

When a tone slides from one pitch to another, the default curve changes quickly at first, which is how the ear expects a falling pitch to behave. Slide shape set to Straight moves at an even rate instead, which sounds more mechanical.

  1. Make a new sound: + Tone, Wave sawtooth, Pitch 2000, Length 0.3, Volume 0.2.
  2. Switch on Slide to another pitch and set Slides to to 200.
  3. Play, then set Slide shape to Straight and play again. The straight version lingers on the high notes and feels more like a machine winding down.

Hear a straight slide (opens in a new tab)