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pulse wave width


dc2k

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I'm new to synthesizers and so I'm going through a synth tutorial.

The first lesson demonstrated thin, medium and square width pulse waves. 

Once you selected the pulse wave and you could cycle through the sizes with a knob.

I was trying to replicate the process on the PX-5s, but I don't think there is the option to adjust the width of a pulse wave. 

I see there are about 10 different pulse wave forms so I'm thinking maybe some of these are thin, some are medium, and then there are about 5 square waves too. 

Is that the way it works? 

 

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Maybe a little OT but, I cannot find any pulse waves - in the Hex tables or synth category - that offer PWM. Anyone find anything like this, or a way to replicate PWM ? 

Just the ones with the ten widths that krullebolle mentioned.  They were added with the 1.10 firmware update, I believe.  Make sure you have the most recent update installed.  If you're asking how to change the pulse-width on the fly, that's not really an option since the PX-5S is pulling tones from samples and not generating them directly.

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Thanks for your reply, Jaspeter. What I was looking for was something that just about every synth I ever owned had - a modulation source (LFO, envelope, velocity, osc.sync.......) that varies the pulse width automatically over time. I guess I knew that this doesn't exist in the PX5s, but hoped somebody clever came up with a way to fake it - maybe a hex layer with several pulse waves at various widths that can be "cross-faded" with amp envelopes? IDK, I'm gonna continue experimenting to try and get a PWM sound.

The PX5s doesn't have oscillator sync either, but it does offer some samples of that. Alas, all the variables are missing - tuning & variance of the synced oscillator, and so on. Maybe they could give us PWM sample of some sort to fool with ?

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In the distant past, Pulse Width Modulation was a cheap solution for making a single oscillator synth sound like it had 'nearly' two oscillators! Seriously! The effect of modulating a square wave's mark space ratio with a LFO is to produce a tone that is very similar to sound of two sawtooth waves beating a little out of tune.

It's definately possible on the PX 5s, to layer sawtooth tones and to detune them. It is even possible to modulate the detuning. QED.

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Been hearing about this a quick Google made find this. 

https://github.com/stretta/BEAP/issues/14

https://github.com/pichenettes/eurorack/tree/master/braids

 

I'm still not sure if bell shaped wave on the XW or PX or at least some with that property dunno what I'm saying here but I do know the XW can have an external source to add to an solo synth and if that code does what requested would be awesome ...makes me guessing if an app that purely works as oscillator does the same, As of yet I've have not discovered if an external oscillator source can be added to the PX5S by the line in or audio. 

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In the distant past, Pulse Width Modulation was a cheap solution for making a single oscillator synth sound like it had 'nearly' two oscillators! Seriously! The effect of modulating a square wave's mark space ratio with a LFO is to produce a tone that is very similar to sound of two sawtooth waves beating a little out of tune.

It's definately possible on the PX 5s, to layer sawtooth tones and to detune them. It is even possible to modulate the detuning. QED.

How can you modulate the detuning? Do you mean with an LFO?

And might as well throw this question in too as I've been wondering. Is "fine tune" in stage settings>zone>mixer the same as "detune" which I only see as an option in the hex layers.

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In order to simulate a classic PMW effect with two sawtooth layers (oscillators) you'd need to simply detune one layer slightly. If you wanted to modulate the PMW effect you could apply one of various pitch modulators to one layer. Certainly on the old Juno 60 you could get quite close to an oscillator sync sound by modulating the pulse width with an envelope. Not sure quite what that might sound like in this situation? My guess is that you'd have to apply the modulation very subtly! I haven't yet dug into the works of the PX5 enough to be sure of all the modulation possibilities, but basically you should be able modulation the pitch of a tone, or a layer within a Hex, with a LFO, a pitch envelope and various midi controllers (including knobs wheels and pedals) haven't seen velocity as a modulation source option though.

Cheers HS

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  • 3 years later...

Never added this info from the Privia blog so in case someone is searching for this subject:

 

On the PX-5S itself, waveform #418 Sawtooth 2 and waveform #420 Sawtooth 4, are inverse waveforms. When combined with any of the other sawtooth waveforms in the PX-5S you can get a nice PWM effect simply by detuning one of the two.  

 

This can create some wonderful rich and thick sounding waveforms.  You will however reach a point detuning the two waveforms from each other where it will sound less like a PWM effect and more like two waveforms that are simply far out of tune from each other.  Luckily there is another method that can be utilized to achieve a PWM effect with a faster cycle.

 

Another method is to create a HexLayer tone with two identical sawtooth waveforms on two of the layers.  

 

One one of the Hex layers, turn the pitch LFO depth to 0.

On the other put it to 64. 

 

Then for the Pitch LFO, choose pulse 2:2 as the type. 

Set the rate to 64 and the depth to 20. 

 

You can adjust rate and depth to taste but now you have a faster PWM.

 

https://priviapro.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/creating-pwm-on-the-px-5s/

 

Also Mike's PX-5S PWM Strings

 

http://www.casiomusicforums.com/index.php?/files/file/713-px-5s-pwm-strings/

 

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