#8 Oscillator Sync
Many notable synths have the ability so sync oscillators. One oscillator will restart the period of another oscillator, so that they will have the same base frequency. It produces a distinct type of sound, harsh but musical. The timbre can be altered on the synched oscillator by varying its frequency input.
Its used famously in that lead in darude sandstorm for example, but many other songs feature it as well, current pop styles use sync in a lot of bass noises.
from wikipedia:
Every time the master oscillator's cycle repeats, the slave is retriggered, regardless of its position. If the slave is tuned to a lower frequency than the master it will be forced to repeat before it completes an entire cycle, and if it is tuned to a higher frequency it will be forced to repeat partway through a second or third cycle. This technique ensures that the oscillators are technically playing at the same frequency, but the irregular cycle of the slave oscillator often causes unnatural timbres.
I was surprized the synth didn't already have this feature within it. amSynth is the only thing ive found linux wise that is capable of synced oscillators surprisingly enough.
linux wise, amsynth and the blepvco ladspa plugin can accomplish this syncing behavior, getting something similar into zyn's powerful oscillators would be amazing
I can see what you are getting at, and this might be possible for the Addsynth engine, although have you any idea just how many oscillators there can be? It isn't a small number! I suspect it would make a mess of the Subsynth engine, and I don't think it would be possible at all for Padsyth (which is a perfectly looping wavetable generator).
Actually, on further thought it wouldn't be possible on Subsynth either as there are no oscillators in it! It's a variable high Q white noise filter :)
Final review of this idea.
To do this, even for AddSynth would require a massive re-write of the engine with risks to stability as well as probably greatly increased DSP load. If anyone else wants to try producing a patch I'll look at it but otherwise I'll eventually close this request.
One of our developers thinks this might now be possible (Yoshimi has changed a lot in recent years). We can't promise anything at the moment, but the feasability is being examined.
We don't have oscillator sync, but we DO now have LFO sync :)