What Is Wavetable Synthesis?
"The recorded waveform could be anything we can capture (or create) digitally. We could record a snippet of a beloved old analog synth, or an acoustic instrument. We could even capture a bird call, or the sound of the wind.
This is just sampling, right? Not exactly. A sampler typically reproduces longer sounds—perhaps of a few seconds, which may feature many different waveforms over their duration. By contrast, a wavetable synth captures a single cycle of a waveform and reproduces it as the basis for a sound. This is called sample-based synthesis…
Sample-based synthesis can capture and reproduce a broad palette of sounds. But it has its limitations. By reproducing the same sampled waveform every time a note is played, sample-based synths can end up sounding somewhat static and lifeless.
This is where wavetable synthesis comes in. A wavetable synth gives the user not just one waveform at a time, but a stack or ‘table’ of different waveforms. Using digital interpolation, it’s possible to smoothly transition between the different shapes in the table, allowing us to create sounds that shift and evolve, with a liveliness not found in more basic sample-based synths."
Of course some people don’t like the sound, with perhaps some exceptions, of wavetable synthesizers, and I might be one of them. But I was never really quite sure why.
Perhaps it is because they seem a bit of a cheat and at the same time, a bit of a hobble and some ears detect it and are bugged by it, despite the ‘fancy framework’, as if they are watching a film where a third, say, of its frames have been cut out.
That’s perhaps why I asked about how the waveforms are stored…
I know that Matt produced a video that demo’d an interesting, sort of additive-filter-style or additive-synth-style (maybe there’s a better term) application/effect-- kind of a phasing through the wave as though the partials started to get teased or something like that. Perhaps some of you know what I’m talking about. And yet, it still seemed to somehow fall short.
In the quote above from NI’s site, it includes this bit…
“This is just sampling, right? Not exactly.”
…and that’s probably the crux-- that ‘not exactly’: It’s still somehow ‘there’, bugging some of our ears/heads… like it’s a kind of half-assed thing, or cheat or hobble. Something that’s not quite there but almost…
Which brings us back full-circle to that ‘pure synth’ concern I mentioned.