Raspberry Pi Synthesizer – live demo (Oscillators and Phase Distortion)
Background video information below:
You lot should be happy that it was a grim, wet, windy Bank Holiday as I got to plug in my Pi and make a video. Sorry the frame rate of the second half is low, it’s my Mac not being fast enough to capture everything.
So – here’s an indication of quite how rich a single-oscillator synth can be (as in, I left OSC B cranked down to zero throughout). OSC A is set to a ‘sin’ wave (which does actually have a *little* bit of harmonic content as it’s not really a sin, it’s a short power series), but all the amazing richness comes from manipulating the phase of the oscillator during each cycle of the waveform. An EG is used to stretch and squash the phase over the lifetime of each note, then the LFO is pulled in to add a warbly, squishy immenseness.
And no explicit frequency manipulation – everything here is being induced by messing with the phase within each cycle of the waveform, the fundamental is not being manipulated, at all. Things get beyond awesome when you add in pitch modulation at the same time as Phase Distortion.