Synth question

Based on a little research, it seems like how it transitions from one sound to the other when using a pitch bend. Instead of a smooth up and down, like a trombone slide, it is more of a stepped change in tone pitch.
 
famous beagle said:
Oh ... it has to do with the pitch bend? I didn't know that.
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Well, not necessarily. In fact, in my experience, most pitchbenders on keyboards are not steppy (at least audibly), and do the glissando thing pretty smoothly. I would use the example of a typical pitchbend to illustrate something that is not stepped.

With a stepped filter (or anything), as you turn a knob, you change a parameter in a series of jumps from one value to the next.
 
Nothing to do with pitch-bend (which can however suffer from a similar phenomenon). A "steppy" filter sweep is caused by digital quantisation of the cutoff frequency - at high resonance levels a slow sweep may be heard to move up or down its range in discrete steps rather than smoothly, something that a purely analogue-controlled filter will never do (unless you have a modular synth that will allow you to do this deliberately!) On most modern analogue synths, the cutoff frequency is quantised in this way to allow overall digital control of the analogue circuitry. The trade-off is worthwhile in most cases, as MIDI control of filter parameters would be impractical without it.
 
Simon Beck said:
Nothing to do with pitch-bend (which can however suffer from a similar phenomenon). A "steppy" filter sweep is caused by digital quantisation of the cutoff frequency - at high resonance levels a slow sweep may be heard to move up or down its range in discrete steps rather than smoothly, something that a purely analogue-controlled filter will never do (unless you have a modular synth that will allow you to do this deliberately!) On most modern analogue synths, the cutoff frequency is quantised in this way to allow overall digital control of the analogue circuitry. The trade-off is worthwhile in most cases, as MIDI control of filter parameters would be impractical without it.
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I like your explanation better than mine!
 
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