Howdy all,

going through a lot of pd documentation and help browser examples, I'm fluent enough to put together some fun fm stuff.

I'm now working on some concepts that require precise phase relationships between different components.

I've failed to pick up on how an osc~, phasor~, etc. component can be toggled between free-running and synced.

I'm hoping its something simple?

thanks in advance

Well, I was about to refer you to a post on hard syncing I did, but I realized it was in response to you. So now I'm thinking I don't fully understand your question. Syncing oscillators should always be done with a master [phasor~], so you wouldn't really toggle it so much as you would alter the output of the master [phasor~]. (Just in case my earlier response didn't make that clear.) Are you maybe asking about phase offset? If so, you can do it like this:

[phasor~]
|\
| \
| \
| [tabread4~ mywave]
|
[+~ .5]
|
[wrap~]
|
[tabread4~ mywave] <--will be synced to above oscillator,
but 180 degrees out of phase

hmm. ah, okay, that's common sense. I should have picked up on that. Thanks for helping me out a second time on the same issue, haha. That will work for the main thing I have in mind.

However, one thing I'd like to do eventually is have two oscillators running at independent frequencies and one phase modulating the other. So it would be useful for me to have a control that would reset the phase on a note-on message. That way I could toggle the control to have either free-running oscillators or oscillators that start at a specific phase each time a note is produced.

to realize this should I just use a master phasor~ by default and toggle in additional phasors as independent frequencies become necessary? I feel like at that point I would still be lacking note-on phase syncing.

The note-on phase syncing is handy for realizing predictable note attacks when the difference in frequency is relatively small. It's a feature in Ableton Live's Operator, for example (I don't own this actually).

Thanks for bearing with me on this. The relative nature of phase has always confused me to a degree.

try sending floats to the right inlet of your osc
.5 for 180° rotation

aha. I see.

I had some difficulties with the right inlet before because I wasn't familiar with the float triggering style aspect

Anyway,

By sending a zero value via a message box to the right inlets of multiple phasor~ objects their phases are synchronized. So basically, in a phase modulation patch it makes sense to have a toggle for sending zeros to the right inlets with note-on messages.

Yeah, just be careful with that. The phase inlet of [phasor~] isn't sample accurate; it waits until the end of the block size to reset the phase. So, for example, you might not be able to get away with using [vline~] for envelopes. [line~] conforms to block boundaries, so you're probably better off using that.

ooh. ok. That's good to know.

I figured out another way to work around it. A phasor~ set to the desired shift up in hertz can be set to modulate the phase of a wrapped wave derived from the master phasor~. This will produce a wave at master frequency plus the shift frequency. Then that wave can be used like a separate oscillator