The most slept on waveform in audio. It’s not a square wave or a sine wave or a sawtooth wave. It’s sample and hold.
It’s not just for synthesizers. In fact, it’s what you’re hearing right now. When you record audio digitally, you are sampling amplitude at discrete intervals.
In this case, 44,100 times every second. You’re taking a picture and then freezing it there until the next sample. The same principle applies in a synthesizer.
But instead of digitizing the sound, an LFO can be set to sample and hold. This filter cutoff is being modulated by a sine wave. It’s opening and closing the filter at a frequency of my choosing.
But rather than sweeping from low to high, this sample and hold LFO will pick a random value at the frequency that I choose. So in this case, instead of digital audio conversion, it’s responsible for this playful and dynamic sound. Please share it with someone who belongs in a Beat Kitchen class.
