Oscillators

FabFilter Twin 2 comes with three full featured oscillators. Combined with our award winning filters this gives you an exceptional broad palette of sounds. The oscillators are very analog sounding and completely aliasing-free (for the digifoobs!). For every oscillator the following parameters are available:

• Enabled
  This will turn an oscillator on or off, so you can easily check the contribution of an oscillator to the overall sound, or turn it off to reduce CPU usage.

• Scale
  Each oscillator can be transposed up to 3 octaves above the master tune.

• Waveform
  The Waveform parameter selects the waveform that the oscillator produces:

  1. Triangle (a soft, warm tone)
  2. Sawtooth (a sharp bright tone that is ideal for filtering)
  3. Square (a more metallic sound, adjustable with the pulse width setting)
  4. Sine (a simple sine wave, the most basic waveform without overtones)
  5. White noise (has a flat frequency response, meaning all frequencies at equal power)
  6. Pink noise (is like white noise but with less power in the higher frequencies)

• Phase Sync
  Next to the waveform setting, the Phase Sync button (with a MIDI icon) toggles oscillator phase sync on and off. When oscillator phase sync is on, the oscillator resets its phase to halfway the waveform on each note-on event. With short, percussive sounds, this works really well to create a sharp and aggressive attack with every note. However, normally you should turn it off because it sometimes introduces unwanted clicks.

• Detune
  The Detune knob sets the detune for each oscillator. The detune knob has a range of +/- one octave, and is extra sensitive around the 0 position. It is a modulation target as well. Like any other knob, you can double-click it to enter a value directly using the keyboard. For example, try '0.5 octaves' or '1 semitone' or '50 cents'. See Knobs for more information.

• Pulse Width
  The Pulse Width knob adjusts the pulse width of the square waveform, from an even square to an infinitely thin pulse (which is actually inaudible). The pulse width is a modulation target and is only available when a square wave is selected.

• Sync
  The Sync knob adjusts the level of hard sync for its oscillator. When set to 1, the oscillator works normally without hard sync. When set to a higher value, the oscillator will 'squeeze' more phases into one actual audible phase, which drastically changes the harmonics in the sound with a metallic-sounding effect. Sync is a modulation target.

• Level/Pan
  The volume and pan of each oscillator can be adjusted using the combined Level/Pan knobs. The inner knob set the overall level and outer ring sets the panning. Both are modulation targets.

• Ring modulation
  You can ring modulate the first oscillator with the second oscillator using the small * button between the component buttons for oscillator 1 and 2. Ring modulation combines two waveforms, and outputs the sum and difference of the frequencies present in each waveform. This produces a signal rich in overtones, suitable for producing bell-like or otherwise metallic sounds.

• Master Tune/Scale
  The Master Tune knob determines the global frequency offset of all oscillators. The menu above the knob transposes the frequency by full octaves. The Master Tune knob is a modulation target so you can modulate the frequency of all oscillators at once.

• Portamento
  The Portamento knob adjusts the amount of portamento or glide, which makes the oscillators slide from one note to another. A little portamento is great for smooth keyboard solos, or when playing large bass intervals. Good portamento is one of those things that give your play just that little bit extra: it's magic. So we have fine-tuned it until it was just perfect! The best thing is: we have created a unique portamento because it also works in polyphonic mode, so you can play sliding chords. You can choose between two different portamento modes.

  1. When using Normal portamento (high/low key portamento), gliding will happen always when holding down keys.

  2. When using Legato portamento (also called fingered portamento), gliding will not be applied for the first key pressed, only for the keys after that.

  Portamento is also a modulation target.

Tips

• Disabling an oscillator reduces CPU usage. Also, the oscillators operate more efficiently when the Sync knob is set to 1 and is not modulated (disabling hard sync).

• When you want to change any oscillator parameter for all oscillators at the same time, just hold down the Alt key while turning a knob.

• The section presets button next to the level/pan knobs for the oscillators lets you store and retrieve all oscillator parameters as a section preset, which is very useful for accessing often-used combinations of parameters.

Oscillator component buttons

Each oscillator is visually represented as a component button. By clicking on the component button and dragging, you can directly alter the most important oscillator parameters:

• Detune: drag horizontally
• Scale: drag vertically
• Sync: drag horizontally while holding down the Ctrl (Windows) or Command (OS X) key
• Wave Form: drag vertically while holding down the Ctrl (Windows) or Command (OS X) key

Click on a button to open the full oscillator interface (shown in the screen shot above) that provides access to all parameters. For other component shortcuts, see Component buttons.

Next: Filters

See Also
Overview