In the absence of active stabilization, the repetition rate and carrier–envelope offset frequency would be free to drift. They vary with changes in the cavity length, refractive index of laser optics, and nonlinear effects such as the Kerr effect.  The repetition rate can be stabilized using a piezoelectric transducer, which moves a mirror to change the cavity length.
In Ti:sapphire lasers using prisms for dispersion control, the carrier–envelope offset frequency can be controlled by tilting the high reflector mirror at the end of the prism pair.  This can be done using piezoelectric transducers.
In high repetition rate Ti:sapphire ring lasers, which often use double-chirped mirrors to control dispersion, modulation of the pump power using an acousto-optic modulator is often used to control the offset frequency.  The phase slip depends strongly on the Kerr effect, and by changing the pump power one changes the peak intensity of the laser pulse and thus the size of the Kerr phase shift. This shift is far smaller than 6 rad, so an additional device for coarse adjustment is needed. A pair of wedges, one moving in or out of the intra-cavity laser beam can be used for this purpose.
The breakthrough which led to a practical frequency comb was the development of technology for stabilizing the carrier–envelope offset frequency.
An alternative to stabilizing the carrier–envelope offset frequency is to cancel it completely by use of difference frequency generation (DFG). If the difference frequency of light of opposite ends of a broadened spectrum is generated in a nonlinear crystal, the resulting frequency comb is carrier–envelope offset-free since the two spectral parts contributing to the DFG share the same carrier–envelope offset frequency (CEO frequency). This was first proposed in 1999  and demonstrated in 2011 using an erbium fiber frequency comb at the telecom wavelength. This simple approach has the advantage that no electronic feedback loop is needed as in conventional stabilization techniques. It promises to be more robust and stable against environmental perturbations.