Reference Manual
CHAPTER 22. LIVE INSTRUMENT REFERENCE 341
with lots of high harmonics. This also means that more complex oscillator waveforms, such
as Saw 32, tend to be more sensitive to aliasing than pure sine waves. Aliasing is a
two-fold beast: A bit of it can be exactly what is needed to create a cool sound, yet a bit
too much can make the timbre unplayable, as the perception of pitch is lost when high
notes suddenly fold back into arbitrary pitches. Operator minimizes aliasing by working in a
high-quality Antialias mode. This is on by default for new patches, but can be turned off in
the (PC) /
Ctrl
(Mac) context menu. To maintain backwards compatibility, presets
created in earlier versions of Live will load with Antialias turned off. The Tone parameter
in the global section also allows for controlling aliasing. Its effect is sometimes similar to a
lowpass lter, but this depends on the nature of the sound itself and cannot generally be
predicted. If you want to familiarize yourself with the sound of aliasing, turn Tone up fully
and play a few very high notes. You will most likely notice that some notes sound completely
different from other notes. Now, turn Tone down and the effect will be reduced, but the
sound will be less bright.
The frequency of an oscillator can be adjusted in the shell with its Coarse and Fine controls.
An oscillator's frequency usually follows that of played notes, but for some sounds it might
be useful to set one or more oscillators to xed frequencies. This can be done for each
individual oscillator by activating the Fixed option. This allows the creation of sounds in
which only the timbre will vary when different notes are played, but the tuning will stay the
same. Fixed Mode would be useful, for example, in creating live drum sounds. Fixed Mode
also allows producing very low frequencies down to 0.1 Hz. Note that when Fixed Mode is
active, the frequency of the oscillator is controlled in the shell with the Frequency (Freq) and
Multiplier (Multi) controls.
Operator includes a special Osc<Vel control for each oscillator that allows altering frequency
as a function of velocity. This feature can be very useful when working with sequenced
sounds in which the velocity of each note can be adjusted carefully. Part of this functionality
is the adjacent quantize control. If this control is activated, the frequency will only move in
whole numbers, just as if the Coarse control were being manually adjusted. If quantize is
not activated, the frequency will be shifted in an unquantized manner, leading to detuned
or inharmonic sounds (which very well could be exactly what you want...).
The amplitude of an oscillator depends on the Level setting of the oscillator in the shell and
on its envelope, which is shown in its display and can be adjusted from there. It can also
be modied by note velocity and note pitch with the Level<Vel and Level<Key parameters
available in the lower portion of each oscillator's display.