Sound & waveforms
Every sound starts as a wiggle. Meet the four shapes that build almost everything else.
Press a key on almost any synth and, before anything else happens, an oscillator starts vibrating — pushing air back and forth hundreds of times a second. The shape of that vibration is the waveform, and it is the raw material of every sound a synth makes.
try it — waveforms
All four shapes above play the same note — the same pitch — yet they sound completely different. That difference is harmonics: extra, higher tones hiding inside the wave.
- The sine is the pure one — a single frequency, no harmonics. Soft and hollow, like a whistle or a tuning fork.
- The triangle adds a few quiet harmonics — still mellow, a touch reedier.
- The square keeps only the odd harmonics — hollow and woody, the classic chiptune tone.
- The sawtooth has every harmonic — bright and buzzy, the richest raw material and the favourite thing to feed into a filter.
More harmonics means a brighter, busier sound. That is the whole game: pick a shape with the right raw brightness, then — as the next topics show — filter it and give it an envelope.
Keep learning