the miracle of oscilators

You might know oscillations from the world of clocks and communications systems that support your WIFI’s carrier signals but in the world of music technology, oscillators also reign as the heart to sound and wave making, converting the very motion of current into vibration and sound; however, in order to convert electricity into motion, charge must be built up first - this is why analog synth have a capacitor with two plates to accumulate positive and negative charges that create the oscillation which converts into sound.

Oscilators are miraculous because they can turn simplicity into infinity

Oscillators convert raw electric potential into music possibility and the raw tones that are sculpted into pads, basses, leads, noise, and textures. Every electronic instrument since the dawn of electronic instruments relies on oscillators. if there is one miracle in the world of electronics it is the oscilator. Oscillators are the fundamental tone generator of electronic sound. When you hear a synth tone, you are hearing electricity being rhythmically shaped thousands of times per second. This makes for the secret charm of analog synths which use VCOs(Voltage controlled Oscilators), and explains why their tones drift ever so slightly because they are alive and at their base is direct current conversion, electricity to sound. Truly beautiful mirror of subtle nature.

Within a synth you can have anything between 1 to 4 oscillators that may include LFOs and noise generator. If you go more than that, it will be unstable. The magic of synth in fact come when a coupling or more of oscillators start to interact and dance together. Oscillators can also be modulated by other oscillators like in ring modulation or frequency modulation, or amplitude modulation or LFO modulation – all of these modulations rely on oscillators modulating other oscillators.

VCO, DCO, DDS, and NCO

Because VCOs are so unpredictable and ever so slightly drift in tone, phase, and, key reset, some musicians in 70s and 80s were not comfortable on stage and for this DCOs (Digitally controlled oscillator) were created for the first time by companies like Roland, which is basically an analog circuit oscillator that phase loop locked by a digital signal to have a stable pitch, key reset, and phase time. This is the hallmark of synth like Juno series and later predecessors.

Shortly later, the DDS, direct digital synthesis which spelled out FM synths, Wavetable synthesis, Physical Modeling, Vector synthesis, Additive synthesis and the most popular sample synthesis. Here digital code allows predictability but also complex wave algorithmic creation, a blissful deviation from organic drift. The DDS models are stable and predictable but have more potential for aliasing and quantization error unlike the analog counterparts. Also its sample rate is limited therefore its bandwidth also unlike the unlimited bandwidth of analog synths.

A relative to DDS is NCO, which is a numerically coded oscillators - we find these in virtual emulations and VSTs in general, computer programs which are algorithmic run numerically coded operations that create sound. They share the same properties of stability, aliasing, and all else with DDS.

What would you prefer stable and predictable or the vice?