Ah yes, of course.
A sawtooth is a wave that looks like the blade of a saw. It is pretty close to sinusoidal, so it sounds somewhat like a single tone, but there is some distortion and harmonics; not nearly as much as you'd get from a square wave, though.
A synthesizer has an envelope generator, to model how real instruments increase in volume, keep a steady volume while active, and then decay. The envelope is usually multiplied by the underlying waveform, like a sawtooth, to give it these characteristics.
If you have a musical keyboard, pressing a key chooses the frequency of the sawtooth, and the moment that the key is pressed and released trigger the envelope generator and choose its shape.
For the psytrace bass line-- instead of the envelope generator being multiplied by the signal (and controlling its amplitude directly), instead it is used to sweep a filter. How much of the distortion and harmonics you hear from the sawtooth changes over the course of the note and gives the bassline its distinctive sound.
In Fourier terms, a sinusoidal is the fundamental frequency. A square wave contains the fundamental frequency + all odd harmonics. A saw wave contains the fundamental frequency + all odd and even harmonics.
No distortion is needed to shape a saw wave and the rest of what you said is inaccurate.
Total harmonic distortion measures the amount of power that you have in harmonics vs. the fundamental wave. A purely sinusoidal tone would have no energy in harmonics; a saw would have 44% of its energy in harmonics.
Maybe you're nitpicking and saying that it's not "distortion", but harmonic distortion as a metric of how much energy is in harmonics-- because the primary way we used to get those harmonics is by distortion of a sine wave-- is common lingo.
The fact that you have second harmonics is what makes saws so useful as a basis function for synthesis.
It's this sort of stuff that makes it so good. Nothing like eavesdropping on a highly technical conversation in an esoteric field. Love it.
The guidelines are guidelines. We all work to interpret them. HN themselves in introducing the guidelines says that "empty" comments can be okay if they're positive, which I feel this was.
> The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience. Whereas comments like "lol" or "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard" teach us nothing.
> Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.
The statement dates to 2014.