Learn About the Different Types of Oscillator for Homemade Synthesizers

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Loren Parker with Expert Village, and I'm going to talk about different types of oscillators now. You can generate different waveforms with your oscillator. When you point a microphone directly at a speaker what you're usually hearing is a piercing sine wave, sort of the quintessential wave form like this, it has nice rounded edges, and it sounds very pure and very piercing, but that's not the only type of waveform that we can generate. And in fact, what we're going to be doing today is using a one chip, one very simple cheap chip and a couple components and making a square wave oscillator. And it makes exactly like it sounds, a square. There are also triangle wave oscillators that move like this, and then there are what they call sawtooth oscillators that move up and sort of form gagged teeth like a saw. And the shape of these waveforms coming out of the oscillator determines what it sounds like. A square wave sounds a little bit more like a clarinet. This is going to sound a little bit more like an oboe, a triangle wave is going to sound very quintessentially electronic, maybe a little bit like a string, and a sine wave sounds very much like a whistle, like a...very pure and kind of piercing. So these are fundamental types of oscillators, the sine wave, the square wave, the triangle wave, and the sawtooth. The easiest to make, we're going to do today, which is the square wave oscillator.

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