exaclty
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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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.
Why not?
Maybe what’s inside my rabbit hole is like an abyss to you, but a golf course to someone else.
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 doesn’t make them any less of a synthesizer.
Sorry, Herman, but to me, it does.
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.
Gotta admit my technical knowledge doesn’t stretch to this, if someone is able to shed light on the subject I’d surely be interested in reading it.
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LOL, let’s get some rest and wait and see then. I’m heading out. Until next time.
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It’s not an abyss, it’s just that golf is boring 
Still a bit funny that you’re not in the analog camp when discussing purity and holism of sound reproduction - not even a mention of euro racks??
I joke ofc, @glomerol id recommend getting some books on the mathematics and design behind sound reproduction, it’ll help answer some of these questions
I’ve done some deep dives myself but in the end I decided that time spent researching is less time creating music
Whats more important, the tools used to create or the creation itself? An age old art conundrum, but that’s the best part - it’s art - you get to make up questions and make up your own answers. My tip is to pick and synth and start making music (or sound design, patches, etc whatever your thing is) 
Don’t let holism consume you Aristotle, unless that torment searching for your answer makes some sick music
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since all digital audio is a sequence of sample values, the entire question is kind of moot in that the issue lacks a genuine case of controversy. even if vital generated only pure math sine waves, it would be doing that in an inherently artificial manner, by supplying samples one at a time instead of groups of samples such as wavetables. both ways, they are still samples.
similarly, if you only had analog synthesizers to use, it would take a lot of allegorically boolean operations for electrical engineers to synchronize the oscillations to arbitrary time constants. the binary component would be in the form of design decisions that were based on discrete measurements probably in the decimal system using standard references. and if you look at what any engineer is doing in an abstract way, they are programming, or conducting a series of events or forces that attempt to arrive at a goal in a repeatable and predictable way. otherwise that synth would really be garbage if it were up to a vote.
also, as far as whether a synth is additive with a zillion sine waves or not is also not a real argument because at the end of the day, the only math a computer ever does is addition. every math function is a series of addition operations. so if you want a program to go fast, you need to look at those operations and figure out a way to get the same or a similar result at the end with as few operations as possible, because at the end of the day you can go crazy and make a “perfect” filter that contains all the quirky non-linearities in the known universe, you’ve just made a plugin that is a gigabyte in size and the latency of 60 seconds on a threadripper, and it wouldn’t sound any different than a synthedit filter from 20 years ago to most people’s ears, so there’s such a thing as diminishing returns.
heck, the same kind of arguments are going on right now probably at gearslutz about preamps and microphones. so, why not just try to focus on writing your sonic story and not worry as much about whether the tool is in the way. tools are like typewriters. what story are you going to write on your typewriter?
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Perhaps, at least for some/me, it boils down, at least in large part, to how and how well the synth can echo reality and/or its complexities and/or somehow transcend them. ‘The math’.
See my most recent main topic post, which is a bit of a continuation/elaboration of this one, about the Terrain synth and let me know what you think. Better still, before you do, try it. I haven’t yet.
It says ‘3-D’ on your video there.
Sorry, you seem to have no clue what you are talking about.
You’re lacking some fundamental actual practice with vital.
Oh absolutely, I don’t deny that. But I mean, I’ve listened to many presets from various wavetable synths-- almost all of them actually, including Vital’s, and while they are all fine and nice, they seem to somehow be lacking in, again, vitality. As much as it might annoy you to read. LOL <3
…Also, I’ll add-- and concede that this will also risk annoying you-- that some have suggested less of a vitality in Vital’s development cycle and that Vital seems to have this weird sort of half-baked FLOSS/NON-FLOSS aspect to it to boot. On the other hand, Terrain is FLOSS, and possibly under the GPL as well. Ditto with Vast Dynamics’ Vaporizer wavetable synth, now that I think about it.
The market’s saturated with subtractive and wavetable synths, maybe oversaturated. So I like how Terrain has sort of broken out of that box a little. I think there’s a lot its dev (and others because it’s properly FLOSS) can add to it.
But what do I know? 