White Noise Sounding Metallic

Questions and Support
#1

Hi,

Within Vital, I have an oscillator set to play white noise, but it is sounding in a highly metallic way. (Like some kind of bad FM or RM?) I’ve spend hours fiddling with every setting I can think of that might be relevant - and a lot of others besides - and I can find no cure. I’m a bit of a newbie with this synth (< 30 hours), but I know that white noise shouldn’t sound like this. What the heck is the cause of this? What am I doing wrong? Forget whatever sound I’m trying to make with this patch, I just want to know why it’s sounding like harsh synthesized metal rather than white noise for the sake of my own understanding. What setting do I need to change to eliminate this?

I’ve attempted to attach the preset patch below - hopefully this works (and is reproducible for others):

White Noise Metal.vital (1.4 MB)

Thanks in advance to anyone who cares to check this out and give an opinion!

#2

Try using the sample, its built in with whitenoise and can keytrack. The thing about sampled whitenoise is that its always changing and moving around, whereas an oscillator just repeats the same periodic cycle over an over again giving it no variations. You can somewhat get a whitnoise effect if you map a super fast lfo to the wavetable position.

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#3

I guess you are using a WN wavetable, right?
Then you have to modulate the WT position. Playing the same WT single cycle over and over again results in “harmonic” content. To avoid this you a.) should make the WT play without following notes and b.) should use a random generator with a rather high frequency to jump around the WN wavetable.
These two will reduce the “harmonic” content…

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#4

Thanks! That all makes some good sense.

#5

Adding to the above: if you use noise oscillator, in addition to modulating the wavetable slice, you can add a couple unison voices and detune them greatly. That’ll make the result even less harmonic.

Also if you want interesting flavors of noise, just use very very fast modulations of pitch, wavetable slice, spectral/wave morph amounts, filter parameters like cutoff, oscillator’s volume/pan—you name it. Not a noise wavetable, many wavetables will do. A bit of chorus or reverb and, say, clicky LFOs become grainy continuous noises.