Audio Damage Axon - Manual (Page 13)

how much the modulator modulates the carrier. In general terms, moving the circle left and right changes the
character or timbre of the sound, and moving it up and down changes its brightness.
If the circle is at the bottom edge of the grid, the modulating oscillator is effectively disconnected and you’ll
hear only a simple sine wave (i.e., a pure tone, and a fairly dull-sounding one at that). As you move the circle
upwards the amount of modulation increase and the sound becomes brighter. Try moving the circle up just
slightly from its lowest position and then moving it left and right to hear how changing the position of the
circle affects the sound.
Timbre XY
The grid labeled TIMBRE is another two-dimensional control which affects the voice’s tone. The TIMBRE
control adjusts a pair of mathematical functions which change the shape of the sound wave that is generated
by the oscillator. In other words, the timbre changes in two different ways as you move the white circle
horizontally and vertically.
If the circle is at the lower-left corner of the grid, the TIMBRE control has no effect on the sound. As you move
the circle either to the right or upwards, you’ll hear the sound change in character. Moving the circle vertically
usually has a greater effect than moving it horizontally. While the FM and TIMBRE controls adjust independent
parts of Axon’s synthesizers, you’ll find that both of them can alter the sound dramatically and the influence of
one is in some sense dependent on the position of the other.
Modulation Busses
The voice controls described so far affect Axon’s voices individually. Changing the pitch control of Voice 2, for
example, has no effect on Voice 3 or any of the other voices. The horizontal sliders at the bottom of the voice
panel allow Axon’s voices to affect each other, altering each other’s timbres in rhythmic and sometimes
unpredictable ways.
Axon contains a pair of internal busses similar to the effects-send busses in a mixing console. Each voice can
send a variable amount of its output to each of these busses. The two busses independently add together (or
sum) the signals from each voice. Each voice can also receive a variable amount of the summed signals from
the busses.
The voices send their signals to both busses in the same manner: two sliders controls how much of the voice’s
output is added to the buss. The voices receive signals from the busses in two different ways. The FM buss,
short for Frequency Modulation, changes the timbre of a voice by modulating its carrier oscillator in the same
manner as the modulator oscillator. The Ring buss, short for Ring modulation, essentially turns the output of