Studio Artist MSG Phase setting

[Chris Northcross]

Focusing on working with MSGs again and am realizing that I really don't understand how the 'phase' setting in the parameters editor works.  Could someone help spell it out for me?

[Synthetik]

I'm assuming you are talking about the phase parameter option associated with the temporal generators. So if a temporal generator isn't attached to a specific MSG parameter, you can just ignore the phase setting. If the parameter has a temporal generator attached to it, then the phase can be thought of as a time offset associated with a time based oscillator.

 

Assume you are using something like a ramp or sine wave oscillator for your temporal generator. You can think of the phase as being the fraction of the wave cycle that has elapsed relative to the starting point of the oscillator cycle. Here's a wikipedia page that talks about the phase of an oscillator and phase shift (for the technically inclined).

 

If you have a background in music synthesis then adjusting the phase of an oscillator is probably going to make intuitive sense. If you don't have that background, then this diagram from the wikipedia page i refer to explains it best.

The increment parameter for a temporal generator specifies the length of an oscillator cycle in frames. The phase is offsetting the positioning of the oscillator, where a phase of 0 or 100% both start the oscillator cycle at frame 1. Remember, oscillators repeat a pattern over and over again. So shifting the phase is shifting the position of the wave cycle on the horizontal time axis.