Week 7: Operator Synth

In my ramblings through my 100 day project of designing a data-based soundscape in 20 minutes, I kept on running into various Operator synths. I had looked at these last year when I was first getting into Ableton, and sort of understood it.

It’s still confusing! Operator is a pretty complex synth to understand everything it does, especially when compared to Wavetable, and so the level of technical rabbit-holing is high.

But, the idea is that you have four possible oscillators you can use. They can be audible ones — ones that generate sounds or inaudible ones, ones that modify the frequency of an audible one.

There a different algorithms, or arrangements of how the oscillators all work. You can have two audible oscillators producing a sound, and with each one being modulated by another. You can apply all sorts of controls to each one.

It’s overwhelming, but the take-home is that I’ll being working with pre-built Operator packs and then making slight modifications to my workflow.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations.