Oscillators, Combiners, and Amplifiers

In this video Mark Doty claims that different the "non square" square waves on the Voyager sound different from standard square waves and have "character". But I think this is incorrect: I believe the Voyager's waves are just square waves with slight differences in phase.

Man there are no good waveshaping videos online. :-(

Note the eight waveforms. These are actually the extreme ends of phase distortion functions applied to a cosine (the other end would be just a pure cosine). Casio simplified the options dramatically as follows: you can construct a waveform out of concatenating any two of the first six waveforms, with no window function. Or you could choose any one of the last three waveforms: these are actually just the same distortion function but with three different window functions.

It turns out that via MIDI you can set any concatenation of eight different distortion functions and run them through any of seven different window functions. But not from the front panel interface. For the nitty gritty details, see this website.

There are few good examples online of either ring or amplitude modulation in synths. :-(

This one shows the effect of amplitude modulation on a sine wave signal, but it's too slow a modulating signal to hear the real effects.

If you got this far, I have some funny ones for you.

Someone really likes his Phase Distortion synthesizers. This is a real video, of an actual popular musician in (I think?) the Netherlands, in 1980s. He dug it up recently and posted it. No, none of them are plugged in.

Nick Batt got lost in a dark room for a bit during a tour of Superbooth, a music instrument convention in Germany. Someone made a loop of it.