LinuxMusicians

Hi all,
I just wanted to query about something that I only realized today: both Yoshimi and Zyn call their Subtractive synth section "Add" and their Additive synth section "Sub."

I'm using Yoshimi version 1.2.4 and Zyn version 2:2.5.4-1kxstudio1


brian

This one has come up before
AddSynth definitely is additive - in very many ways, but in particular, you add in the harmonics you want.

SubSynth is curious in that it depends on what you mean by 'subtractive'. Paul's interpretation is that you start with a band of white noise, and then subtract everything except the bands of noise you want. And that's the point. In the absolute sense of the word, these are not harmonics. They are narrow noise bands (as becomes obvious when you adjust the filter bandwidths)

folderol wrote:This one has come up before
AddSynth definitely is additive - in very many ways, but in particular, you add in the harmonics you want.

SubSynth is curious in that it depends on what you mean by 'subtractive'. Paul's interpretation is that you start with a band of white noise, and then subtract everything except the bands of noise you want. And that's the point. In the absolute sense of the word, these are not harmonics. They are narrow noise bands (as becomes obvious when you adjust the filter bandwidths)

From my small experience, the "Sub" section looks very additive, and vice versa. In my small mental scheme of things, if I consider the "Sub" section as additive and the "Add" section as subtractive, I can find my way around things much easier.


brian

In Adsynth the voice oscillator editor (Where you choose which harmonics you add in) makes it pretty clearly additive IMO. It has a filter but thats not the primary scheme of the sound design.
The bandwidth editor in subsynth is confusing though in this regard, makes it seem additive. Really you can (mis?)use either engine to design sounds using either method.