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Mixers and Audio Objects
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For enormous sonic wealth, the sound generation of the
Percusor offers a special oscillator, the pitch or frequency
of which can be adjusted with the three pushbuttons at the
left of the Percusor. They select the general pitch of the
Percusor in octave steps. Only one of them can be active at
a time. The meaning of the numbers on the switches
stems from the length of pipe organs, as the length of a
pipe was measured in feet. The shorter a pipe the higher
the pitch, or frequency, of its sound. Doubling the length
of pipe resulted in halving its pitch. So, 8 is one octave be-
low 4, and 16 is one octave below 8.
There is another similarity between those big pipe organs
and the Percusor—both are able to produce new timbres
by mixing existing ones. But instead of routing air
through a pipe system, the Percusor’s oscillator offers six
sliders for convenient mixing of six different sounds. Lo-
cate the six sliders and move them up and down, one by
one. We will start from the left, with the slider from the tri-
angle wave. In the synthesizer world waves are named af-
ter their shape; when viewed through an oscilloscope—
which is kind of a TV set for watching the shapes of elec-
trical waves—the triangle wave does indeed look like a tri-
angle.
The triangle wave does not sound as bright as the other
waveforms you will encounter on the next sliders. It re-
sembles a softly blown flute with quite a lot of low-end en-
ergy. Use it as an addition to give your sound creations a
nice bottom end, or use it stand-alone for pleasant, mellow
sounds. Next comes the sawtooth slider. The sawtooth is
one of the two the most popular synthesizer waveforms. It
sounds very bright and rich, resembles stringed instru-
ments and is a good starting point for almost any sound
experiment. The other one of the most popular synthe-
sizer waveforms is the square wave, right beside the saw-
tooth slider. Compared to the sawtooth, the square wave