Is Vital A True Synth Or a Glorified Sample Playback Unit?

Questions and Support
#1

Is Vital merely sampling or is it resynthesizing and, say, storing its ‘waveforms’ (What are they exactly?) as pure sine waves, like in a bank or banks somewhere like maybe in the editor?

My point is is that I’m looking for, at least mostly, a ‘pure’ synth, so to speak, rather than merely a sample playback unit/sampler and/or granular ‘synth’. So is Vital the former and/or what is it?

I realize that samples can be imported and used, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

Also, I know that we can take a sound we’ve made and resample or resynthesize it into a wavetable and/or oscillator, such as to further work on it more… What is going on here, too? If a wavetable is a collection of waves, then what is a wave? A collection of small grains or a collection of sine waves? This distinction seems important for me as granular synths bother me in part because they don’t really seem to be synths, at least by some definition(s).

Thanks!

#2

Bit of a strange question really.

Is any synth really a synth?

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#3

strange question (maybe a chatgpt bot?)…
vital is a wavetable synth with the 4th oscillator being a simple sample playback
no granular afaik

#4

Your question doesn’t make any sense to me, nor do I really care if Vital matches your definition of the term or not and I fail to see the relevance. It sounds good and it’s good to use.

If you want an analog synth then go get one.

#5

@OP:
maybe best to do a google search for “wavetable synthesis”:
https://www.google.com/search?q=wavetable+synthesis&oq=wave&aqs=chrome.1.69i60j69i59l2j46i199i465i512j69i61j69i60j69i65l2.3172j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

should give you plenty of explanations and it will be obvious soon in which category vital will fit :slight_smile:

#6

Yeah I can only really recommend looking into the functional resources behind synth design, such as subtractive/additive synthesis, Fm synthesis, granular and sampler synthesis

Super interesting stuff and your answer is hidden there somewhere can’t really give a detailed answer to your questions without having to explain the difference between those concepts :slight_smile:

But no unless you’re only using the sampler, vitals other oscillators are normal wavetable oscillators.
If you’re getting into what’s “pure synthesis” technically only analog is truly “created”, all digital sounds are only ever 1s and 0s
But let’s not start that rant here haha

#7

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.

#8

I’m less than crazy about ‘analogue’, or subtractive synths too if with at least one exception; Sylenth1. I think subtractives are way overplayed and to the exclusion of other methods and a more diverse sonic ecosystem. But I also understand that ‘it’s the market’, despite the saturation.

Like the wobble bass. (rolls eyes)

Sylenth1 seems to be doing something different under the hood that I and others pick up and appreciate. That’s in part perhaps why it has stood the test of time.
By contrast, I listened today to Spire, incidentally, at least on some YT videos, and it just didn’t do it for me like Sylenth1. But maybe it’s just the presets.

kmc16091

Bit of a strange question really.

Is any synth really a synth?

Bit of a rabbit-hole.

But I wouldn’t knock ‘strange’ unless you’re one of those who goes for ‘wobble bass’ and what everyone else is doing.

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#9

Sylenth isn’t analog though, it’s a plugin. Analog synths only exist as physical objects.

Wt synths sound like what you play through them. Like you can sample an analog waveform and slip it into Vital and it’s going to have a different character even when it would be the same waveform that Vital already has, like a saw, naturally.

That, and all synths have their own character, and Vital does too. A lot of that comes from the filters. I bet that’s what’s up with Sylenth as well. The filters have a bit of fairy dust in them.

When it comes to wt synths, they easily put out unnaturally strong and brittle high frequency content that has f.ex. led some people to adjust their eq slopes steeper.

There’s so much in play that I doubt it’s possible to categorize wt synths like that based on their types of oscillators, it’s probably more about how people use them.

That said you only need to play with synth1 to see how much the sound engine design matters. That’s one wild beast compared to modern hyper controlled synth sound trend.

I used to not like the modern sounds for a long time. They were too digital and lifeless to be enjoyable. Either the sounds got better, my taste changed, or my ears got fucked. Or some or all of those.

#10

not necesseraly:
u-he’s HIVE and its uhm scripting language is a mathematical expression
further info here:

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#11

Omfg nobody ever told me this! Thanks!

…on a side note, I assume that scripting generates samples for the wavetables, so it’s basically another means to the same end.

#12

Yeah again, let’s not get into the “are digital sounds real sounds” stuff, are single cycles truly samples? Is a stack of cycles (wavetable) more of a sample that a singular cycle? Honestly, who cares the question is always “does it sound good”

@glomerol you can totally not like the sound of a synth, they all do sound unique in very subtle ways. Same goes for Massive and Serum, both have a unique sound despite being both wavetable synths. Even if you load the exact same wavetables

So anyway, don’t rabbit hole yourself too much - go with your gut, if you don’t like the sound of Vital, and do like the sound of Sylenth or Hive (both great synths!) or prefer the sound of say Phaseplant, etc
These are your tools are you never have to explain why you like the ones you do, if they work for you that’s all the matters :slight_smile:

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#13

afaik yes
if i understand it correctly,
the math expression becomes a wav that is (mathematically) perfectly matched in a wavetable frame

but research on u-he’s kvr forum - urs (and others of the company) explains it in more detail…

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#14

:+1: exaclty

#15

If there’s a synth that doesn’t have a characteristic sound that would be Phase Plant. One thing is that it’s more of a modular synth builder than one synth so it doesn’t have kinda fixed workflow that would encourage certain lind of use. But also to me the filters and effects sound quite generic by themselves, and then you combine those to get more personality for it.

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#16

The ‘holism’ of an instrument is important to me and many others, if Vital skin designs and ravings about the UI layout are any indication. We can say that about any instrument and why people gravitate to one over another.

So it’s not just about the sound.

Sure, electronics are math, but then it’s all converted into acoustic sound waves that then enter our ears.

Part of my interest is how Vital, specifically, is approaching the reproduction of the sound. (Matt doesn’t just say ‘wavetable’ exactly, either, he adds ‘spectral warping’ to it. So what’s going on underneath and might it be different-- and how-- to other wavetable synths and might it share some similarities to synths that aren’t wavetable synths? There’s even a thread hereon that talks about Vital in relation to additive. Also, DATABROTH on You Tube suggests that Vital is ‘secretly an additive synth’, whatever that might mean.)

That interest wants to lead to some kind of understanding that can then be applied in a holistic sense to said instrument-- and by implication, perhaps even others-- and how it might add to how I feel about it.

Music’s certainly about that too.

#17

muki

8d

:+1: exaclty

Why not?

Maybe what’s inside my rabbit hole is like an abyss to you, but a golf course to someone else.

#18

Saw waves, for example, can be expressed as a collection of sine waves. So is a saw wave being expressed/rendered like that in Vital or is it expressed and rendered somehow differently, like as ‘just a saw wave’? That seems a simple question.

When you go into the editor, and see all those bars, what does each represent exactly? A sine wave? Granular audio clippings?

When you do a resample or resynthesis, what’s going on and which is the true case-- resampling or resynthesis?-- if only one? If not, which is which and/or when/how?

#19

Thanks for sharing, and I took a quick look, but don’t quite understand it.

Coincidentally, I recently came across, possibly on KVR, an old comment of Urs’ that I interpreted as a possibility at least that some, much, or all of Zebra is really just a glorified granular so-called synth.

Perhaps this is not the case, but if it is, it might go some ways to explaining, for example, why Zebra and other synths along its lines might be especially easy on the CPU.

I have also read that granular synths aren’t really synths, just manipulators of tiny audio fragments-- in short, ‘samples/samplers’.

#20

There’s what Vital calls “wave source” that’s actually additive harmonics. Then there’s audio file source, which is sliced and diced sample. Then there’s “line source” that’s like the first one but without the control of individual harmonics.

Ig line and wave source both get rendered to a sampled wavetable before put out, otherwise Vital would likely eat tons of more cpu time to the point where my rig could barely run it, at least if it would be anything near Zebralette3 which can choke mu cpu with one chord with its additive engine. Dunno how Vital handles the spectral distortion effects though, ig to make sure you gotta read the source code.

Resynthesis makes an audio file and uses that as an audio file source.