[sdiy] How DCOs work

[Tom Wiltshire]

On 10 Oct 2016, at 21:51, Richie Burnett <rburnett at richieburnett.co.uk> wrote:

> The total period needs to be the inverse of the average frequency over the full cycle, which means the micro would have to keep track of the progress of the integrator ramp at all times, in order to decide exactly when to call an end to the present cycle and reset the integrator.

This suggests using an NCO rather than a divide-by-x style of counter to me. Then if the pitch doubles, so does the NCO count, and the NCO phase should be a match for the integrator state at any point. Give or take a bit of "character", of course.

> All of this is way more hassle than just synthesising the waveform you want with BLIT, BLEP, minBLEP, or whatever, and dealing with modulations as they come at you.

Yes, I absolutely agree. There are better ways these days than trying to make DCOs do things they don't want to do. But I can't help wondering about "can we make this work?"

Tom