Why is it worth looking into? If you are looking for analog sound then it’s important to note that analog synths afaik never produce “mathematically pure” waveforms. For instance - Sawtooths never look like pure sawtooths … or some even do weird mixtures like the moog shark teeth Take a look here, and you know what I mean: https://www.adventurekid.se/AKRTfiles/AKWF/view/AKWF_bw_saw/waveforms.html
Thanks for sharing these. 4400+ waveforms packed into a nice 6MB file.
Any tips for using these in Vital? AFAICT, you can only load one of the waveforms into the wavetable editor – I had hoped to load one in, set a keyframe, load in another, and have Vital blend between the two. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that it works that way…
Another thanks to you Peter for posting these great links.
The visually thing is really great, on the right side there is the frequencie spectrum? Please correct me if i´m wrong. But this would make so much sense, i think i understand some things better now.
@qub1t
I try to inform myself in these things right now, too.
" There are no popular third party programs for making your own wavetables, so your best bet is to look at the wavetable editor in your synth of choice. However, another option is WaveEdit by Synthesis Technology – it’s free, open-source, and cross-platform, but sadly has not seen an update since Feb 2018."
Didn´t try myself yet. You can try serums WT editor too, they say it´s strong and has good manual.
pls let me know if something works and if you find a way to blend between waves. It should be possible somehow to make vital calculate “additional” waves in between a sine and a square for example?
Thanks for this, I’ll add it to the article. But it’s fair to say there’s no popular method for creating wavetables, it’s still sort of a wild west situation.
No need to correct you, you are right. Left is the waveform, and the spectrum to the right.
WaveEdit is built for a specific device. It has a definition of a wavetable slot lenght of 256 samples afair and thus is considerably shorter than the slotlenght of 2048 samples used by Icarus, Parawave, Avenger and Serum.
Yes you can do use other WT Synth editors. I Use that of Icarus 2 for instance. It comes with a manual which frees me from guess work like in vitals editor. It allows me to edit wavetables slot by slot, allows me to render a full patch into a wavetable, do severall forms of resynthesize of any sample into wavetables and stuff. Then I could go and export the wavetable
And by the way - The blending is done by the blend modes in the wavetable editor.
Crazy how much you can see sounds.
When I was chopping up sounds with audacity I noticed that my drum sounds looked very different from the drums in professional music.Then I switched to tuning them with the eye not the ear ending up with the best drums I created so far.
Maybe I try doing it like Beethooven making music without hearing it.
Ok very good informations from you Peter.
I did some more research on this, might be interessting for those who can´t use Icarus or Serum editor.
“To make your own wavetable, it can be any multiple of 2048, but if it is not a multiple it will be processed and not be exactly what you created”
I will try what happen when i use 256 x 8 as slot length, and things like that maybe there is some workaround.
Also it seems to be possible to display the length of wav file in “samples” with audacity, but i coudn´t figure out how that works yet.
Man that Icarus 2 looks very interesting. But now i´m with vital.
Ahh ok Blend modes that one was easy…, thanks. Yes a manual would really help. But i think it will not come so soon, as matt is probably busy with fixing all kinds off stuff.
Try audacity when you want to make or edit Wavetables! It´s not just a butcher you can do Brain Surgery too!
You can display the length of your wave file there in samples.
You can zoom in so close until you can see and edit the single samples. Maybe this makes some things possible that you can´t do in other editors, i don´t know them.
When you cut a wav to 2048 samples and then load it into vital you end up with one wave filling all 256 Wave Frames with the same wave.
When you cut 2 wav files to 2048 samples, paste em together and then load it into vital you end up with first wav in Frame 1 and second wav in Frame 256 and some kind of fade or blend in between. Don´t know what happens there exactly. This happens in init preset didn´t try yet if you can change that with options or in the WT Editor.
When you cut 2 wav files to 2048 samples,paste them together with 2048 samples of silence in between and then load it into vital you end up with first wav in Frame 1 and second wav in Frame 256, in the middle part silence and a fade or blend to the 2 waves.
When you use less than 2048 samples it acts like with 2048, with more than 2048 samples it fills it into the 256 frames like a sample when u scroll trough them while playing the sound.
Didn´t expect that, thought it would look like the Icarus drum kit where you can scroll trough the single waves with no blend. If it´s not to much effort can you provide the icarus kit as a wave file? When this possible at all. Would be interesting to see how it looks in audacity. But probably there is some information in that vitaltable file that gets lost…
Cool Stuff, vcvr!!! I think your on the right track to understand nerding around with wavetables
For previous experiments with other “Wavetable” Synths like Zebralette, Thron or FathomSynth I did a lot of “splitting” and “resamplings” in Wav Editors like Wavozaur as well.
What I did:
I took an arbitrary sample of lenght A in samples (A is a placeholder/variable)
Then there’s the value B which is the number of slots (aka frames) a wavetable can have and C the number of samples per slot.
Then I computed the maximum number of samples a Synth can hold in one WT.
I resampled the original sample to fit into the maximum size 44100 * (C*B) / A … that often gave some weird frequencies… then split the sample into it’s slots and later fed that into the synth
Anyhow that way I was able to kind of “play back” samples in a variety of synths that where not meant to do so … I was able to make the very restricted UHE Zebralette Speak or for instance look for my Thorn (Dimitry Sches) track in my Sound Cloud called “Kraftwerk Tribute”. It’s a tribute to Kraftwerks numbers … sorry german “lyrics” …
All that stuff I did with the wave editor by hand is no longer needed with modern wavetable synths like Vital and that is really good. Though this resamplings often gave wonderful robotic fx on speech.
Why I say this - because I think wavetable synths offer a lot of room for experimentations … if you want to think out of the box of “EDM wobbles and basses”
Garnet so schlecht für en Bayer!
Ne Spaß bei Seite, richtig gute Lieder gehört bis ich bei dem Kraftwerk unten war!
Und sehr vielseitig! osc 134 ist mir aufgefallen!
Yes, but i allready noticed there is a lot of calculating and cutting and pasting involved. Just tried how much samples you need to move until you can hear it. If you paste a single one into silence you can allready hear a click. Thought it would be more you need to move. Maybe i can tune the edge of some waves a bit or something. Still researching for an acid preset too. Best would be to find a original 303 sample, just pure saw and square wave. Read something about an old synth where they used hyperresonating waves because the filters where different somehow. Figure that out too. Rebuildt the accent…
Man and i read something you can use scripts to make WTs…
This is very interesting to hear what you allready did. Very inspiring!
Maybe for those who understand how the WT editor in vital works, i still need the handwork:stuck_out_tongue:
Putting speach into WT is another great tip from you.
If you find some, please let me know. I spent a some time looking for unprocessed clean 3o3 saw and square but didn’t find any. Not even pictures of them … From what I read on wikipedia the square is kind of special. It would be interesting to see how they look like.
But let’s not forget that the sequencer in the 3o3 with it’s acent and glide functions as well as custom modifications with distortion circuits play an importand role. These glides I tried to simulate in my patch… not the real thing, but the best I could come up within a time box.
This is bad news. Yes even pictures would be very helpfull. With my new powers i could just paint some.
Will try to find some,or maybe a clone will help.
But i found pictures and manuals, service manuals and all kinds of stuff.
Glide and accent is very important to recreate, found some info on that.
Some even say every 303 sounds different and they tried out some before they found a good one. Don´t know if thats true, if its because they allmost 40 years old or whatever.
Any thought about that hyperresonating wave thing? may be something like this? AKWF_saw_ 5, 17 or 37
Man your preset is really good, i can learn a lot from that. Do you work with that lfo pattern when you make songs?
Found this guy!
India
1982
roland Jupiter-8, 303 and 808
check him if you don´t know him allready.
Have some problems to belive this is from 1982.
Take a look here, and you know what I mean: https://www.adventurekid.se/AKRTfiles/AKWF/view/AKWF_bw_saw/waveforms.html
