Wavetable-based distortion

Hi there!

I was thinking recently how I could simulate an accurate TR-909 Kick.

You need a diode-clipped triangle wave oscillator (easy, I can do that with a standard wavetable oscillator) feeding into a single-transistor VCA, which has a very specific response.

Since I cannot replicate that response using any of the existing Vital modules, I had an idea.

It would be great to have a distortion module that takes a wavetable, and uses it to distort the input.

Then I could create a wavetable for the TR-909 output VCA, indexed by control voltage, and use it to accurately model the response I want.

I could then module the wavetable with an envelope to do what I need.

The wavetable distortion module would simple take an input, and return that point in the wavetable as a result, along with the wavetable morphing features.

It’d be like a wavetable-based distortion lookup table.

Either that, or you could add it as a distortion option to the existing distortion module. Either way, I can see a lot of VERY useful use-cases for it…

8 Likes

I was thinking about this as well! It seems like it would be relatively easy to implement, yet very useful! (Especially considering that the existing distortion types only really generate odd harmonics)

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I have no idea what a wavetable-based distortion would sound like, but it (the idea) sounds interesting.

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