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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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’.
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.
That’s like the definition of a granular synth. It doesn’t make them any less of a synthesizer. The source doesn’t matter, what a synth does is that takes audio source, manipulates it, and puts it out according to user defined parameters. Synths are basically effect chains with primary sound source.
What sets them apart from samplers imo is that a sampler plays back samples that can be used as they are, where a synth uses sampled material to construct a new kind of a signal. The line seems blurry to me, since surely one can use many samplers like a synth, but rarely can use a synth like a sampler.
AFAIU, granular ‘synths’ don’t reinterpret the audio, though. They use it as-is and just cut it up/spit it out in fancy ways. Even AI seems to be properly reinterpreting the audio.
As per your previous comment, it does seem like that, like Vital is kind of what I might feel is cheating/kludging/‘hybridizing’ its way to sound design and isn’t really approaching it from a kind of ‘purist’ standpoint, say by using 516 oscillators to produce 516 sine waves and that’s that.
Maybe I should be looking at Virsyn’s upgraded 64-bit Cube 2 or Razor or Parsec?
What do you think of physical modeling synths? Seems some approach ‘physical modeling’ differently too.
If we want to talk effect chains, seems granular synths are glorified equalizers, yes? But again, my feeling about it, at least so far, is of granular synths as not really being synths in a pure sense, but more like fancy samplers because they are using the same audio.
The differences can be subtle but probably best explained by an impersonator impersonating your voice, say. It’s not your voice anymore, but a reinterpretation– a synthesis – of it. To me, that seems like real synthesis.
There’s what Vital calls “wave source” that’s actually additive harmonics.
When and where is that applied and could one work entirely in that part/section/realm in Vital without touching the rest? If so, how flexible is it?
It would be just impractical to play back 512 or 1024 sines real time to construct a waveform in terms of processing economy. If your use case requires that ig you gotta use that sparingly, bounce it or wait until we have more powerful processors to be able to use that kind of synthesis extensively in production. Playing a single synth live might work okay if your rig has enough processing power, but we’re really hitting the limits here.
Other than that there might be synths that use trigonometric maths to generate certain waveforms, but they’re then bound to the limits of those.
But I just mentioned 3 additive synths that have been around for over a decade-- Razor, Parsec and Cube 2. I’ll add Harmor.
So why should current rigs not be able to handle what rigs could ~10 years ago, and therefore, by implication, Vital, if I can use it strictly in the additive sense? Can I? Did you not just write, “There’s what Vital calls ‘wave source’ that’s actually additive harmonics.” ?
Wave source is one of the wavetable editor’s primary sound sources. As said, that likely does get rendered to sampled wavetable frames non-realtime as reaching the nyquist frequency from the bottom of human hearing would require about a thousand additive sines that would eat up so much cpu time that it’s hard to justify that with the current hw tech. As said, you can get a taste of that with Zebralette3.
exaclty