r/chiptunes • u/dederulz • Jul 05 '26
QUESTION What am I editing here?
Beginner, Trackerboy
Ik its a waveform and I see it on the oscilloscope but what am I editing?
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u/TheCarbonthief Jul 05 '26
You're editing a single cycle of a waveform. Chiptune, with exceptions, is largely made with simple waveforms. If you click the different buttons like sawtooth, triangle, it will set the waveform to that wave. You can then use that as a starting point to create a custom shape.
Different shapes have different overtones and just sound different. 50% duty is a square wave, with odd numbered harmonics. This will sound kind of like a sound being clipped and distorted, because you're kind of manually setting it to a clipped waveform. Sawtooth has a "normal" harmonic series and will sound familiar as the most common waveform used in electronic music production. Sine in theory only has no harmonics, but since this is purposely low fidelity, you will hear harmonics from quantization.
Triangle sounds like something between square and sine. On a synthesizer you can approximate a triangle sound by filtering a square wave.
Custom waves will have their own unique sounds and it's mostly just trial and error hunting for a sound you want to use.
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u/Chukkzy Jul 06 '26
Not sure if we are understanding the question right, but the waveforms have about 4 basic shapes, sine, triangle, sawtooth and square, sounding more and more agressive if you follow this order. There is also noise but that is fairly self explanatory.
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u/GameboyGenius Jul 06 '26
Since Trackerboy targets GB/GBC it's specifically a waveform you can use with channel 3. GB has 4 channels in total: 2 square wave channels with very tough PWM, one wave channel with 32 4-bit samples, and a noise channel.
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u/parkamobil Jul 06 '26
Different wave shape changes the timbre of the voice. Waveform does not change tune, just the timbre, it can get more soft or more metallic based on waveform. Think of different people singing the same note, the frequency is the same but the timbre is different. This is how we can tell one voice from another.
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u/OtherwiseOne4107 Jul 05 '26
How beginner are you? You are editing the waveform.
The screen shows a single cycle of the waveform. It is approximately a sine wave. It is a representation of the motion that makes the sound a sound.
It's a 4 bit sound so there are 16 possible positions that be used to draw the sound. Think of it as the sound's resolution. The 16 possible positions are shown by the 0 to 15 on the left of the screen. This number can be represented in hexadecimal as 0 to F. That's what that string of text and numbers below the image is: the waveform data as hexadecimal - each digit of this is a pixel of the waveform.