Interlude. What a Saw Sounds Like

Almost nobody has ever heard a bare saw, and that is for the best. If you switch on a sawtooth oscillator and do nothing else with it, a steady, angry buzz will pour from the speaker, something between a dentist’s drill and a wasp shut in a jar, and hardly anyone but an engineer will want to listen to it for more than a minute. Yet the saw sounds in almost every electronic song you know; it is just always dressed in something.

Most often the saw is dressed in a filter. The filter cuts away part of the harmonics, and the buzz turns into a soft bass, or a brass section, or a squelching acid sound, and all of it is the same saw, only trimmed differently.