[sdiy] They aren't sawtooths, they're ramps

[John Mahoney]

At 05:40 PM 11/2/2009, Electronic Battle wrote:
>>>Please can someone talk about the difference between sawtooth and 
>>>ramp waveforms and whether they sound different?
>
>>Sawtooth - sharp transition  from low to high then falls linearly 
>>back to low. repeat.
>>Ramp - linear rise from low to high, sharp transition high to low. repeat.
>
>That's not the case at all; it is just describing the same waveform 
>twice. The defining difference is the nature of the transition being 
>linear or exponential, as per my original email.
...

Think what you want, EB, but what Peng described is the synthesizer convention.

Sawtooth and ramp waves (using the terms as per convention, ahem) 
sound alike in isolation, but they obviously produce very different 
effects when used for low frequency modulation. That's why you'll 
find both many LFOs and VCOs that output both of them. (The 
Synthesizers.com VCO is one example.)

John