Waveforms
From MadTracker Wiki
Waveforms are the building blocks of sound, they can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be. Often with electronic music we start out with simple waveforms, then with the use of synthesis techniques as Additive Synthesis, AM Synthesis, FM Synthesis, Subtractive Synthesis or Granular Synthesis we create super complex waveforms.
We will explain some basic waveforms and the terminology here.
Sine
The sine wave is well known in the world, you must have heard it at some point, if not here's an example of a sinewave. [1]
Saw
The saw wave is one heavy wave form, as you can see it gradualy elevates to the top of the amplitude and then crashes all the way down, unfortionatly madtracker's wave-editor can't show that 'ramp' down, so you'll have to take it from me. An example : [2]
Square
]The Square wave may seem like an heavy one but it's quite mild actualy as you can here in this example [3] Madtracker's wave-editor can't realy show the ramp up and down, so it seems as there are just horizontal lines.
Period
One period for the waveform is just one time the waveform, it then get's repeated overtime to create an continous tone, You can see in this graphic, I greyed out the area that is a repetition of one period, the dark section is one period of a sine waveform :
Frequency
When working with frequency's we talk about Hz ( Hertz ), 1 Hz means that it takes one second for one vibration ( period ). So when you play a sine tone at A3 ( that is around 440 Hz ) there are 440hz vibrations in one second, so that period get's repeated 440 times in one second!
Wavelenght
You can imagine that if a period takes 1 second to finish it must be a whole lot longer then when it would be played 440 times a second. This is called wavelenght, it's the lenght it takes for one period to complete. People often use this in calculating acoustics.
