2008/7/2 Chris McDaniel <ixemul@gmail.com>:
That was fast!  I actually tried that but without the s.sync -- hadn't really noticed that in the docs but it definitely opens some doors :-)

I believe the docs may have assumed words for traditional synthesis techniques were common knowledge for potential STK users but this probably doesn't hold for ChucK, seeing as people are geting into ChucK (and should be able to!) without first getting into traditional synths.

I agree that "modulate" could be documented a little more clearly, for example by referring to a file in the "examples" dir and creating such a file if there is none already. If we don't tell people it needs fairly high amounts of gain before doing modulation in a audible way they might be disappointed.

Thanks very much for clearing it up for me

You're quite welcome. Thanks for making me try it once; I never had before but I like it. That was two minutes well spend.
 


So I have one other question -- can this be used with with STK instruments that (don't appear to) have a sync member?


Well, I think that modulation inputs for Ugens are typical for ChucK Ugens (particularly osc's) and not for STK ones. If we'd go in that direction I think we may need to look at a more elaborate syntax for more elaborate modulation. For example; teh FM we were using in our example isn't actually a form of "sync" at all. You could imagine using both sync and FM on the same oscilator but ChucK won't (currently?) allow this. Another question is that I'm not sure all STK instruments are designed in a way conductive to continuous modulations (I might be wrong there).

What you can still do is call the .last() function of your Modulate Ugen which will get you a float. If you'd add that to a float representing the desired frequency to modulate around and write the result to the .freq() member of a STK Ugen every few ms (or samp) you would get something like our SinOsc example.

I sugest you try that and shout if you run into issues.

Yours,
Kas.