Is there any synth that can do roland's Saw PWM?

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My roland d110 recently died, and although it was a horrible synth there was one sound that it could do that was the business.
It had PWM on the saw waves and the sound it made was the chunkiest thing ever. Is there any VST that can recreate this?

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Hi,

Xils Lab Synthix could do PWM on the Sawtooth:
http://www.xils-lab.com/pages/Synthix_C ... -demo.html


Ingo
Ingo Weidner
Win 10 Home 64-bit / mobile i7-7700HQ 2.8 GHz / 16GB RAM //
Live 10 Suite / Cubase Pro 9.5 / Pro Tools Ultimate 2021 // NI Komplete Kontrol S61 Mk1

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the mks50

but in software, i used vanguard to get as close as possible
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JP6K really does do the Roland SS very well.

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PWM on the sawtooth is handled differently on different synths that have it. Some synths use it to vary the slope to morph into a triangle and then ramp waveform, others create one or two moving holes in the saw's shape, which can be reproduced by amplitude modulating a sawtooth with a variable pulse wave 0 or 1 octaves higher.

Still there are other methods, but those are the major ones. The latter is very 'chunky' so probably what you're looking for. The former is a much smoother sound as, obviously, triangle waves are involved.

Vanguard has some nice PWM saws, then there's Zebra or Zebralette, which let you design any kind of modulated waveform.
http://sendy.bandcamp.com/releases < My new album at Bandcamp! Now pay what you like!

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Thanks for the help. I had little look at the demo for synthix and I'm definitely saving my pennies for it, that sound is really nice, it felt like an up to date version of the sound I had on the D110.

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Virsyn Tera 3

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Oatmeal can do that by using a saw wave as a user wave in "User PWM" mode. And it's free.

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Yes I checked out both zebralette and oatmeal. Oatmeal looked a bit intimidating but Zebralette was very sounding and easy on the eyes, another one for the collection!
Program called Wav2Zebra made it very easy to get the sound from a single cycle of an old recording fantastic!

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Oatmeal is intimidating. If you get the LimeFlavour skin, though, it makes it a bit clearer. And it's so deep and packed with hidden features (like additive synthesis and custom waveforms)glad you got it to work, though.

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the original pwm saw looks like this
edit: oopssie, wrong image
here's the good one
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Last edited by Muzik 4 Machines on Mon Aug 23, 2021 2:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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I have a bunch of wavetables for Zebra/Zebralette on the patch bay including the Roland Saw PWM and variations of just about every other type of PWM available. If you're a fan of PWM like me (have we said enough PWM yet? You have to pronounce it PWUM!) you might find that interesting. It's called Zebroscillators 2.5 :)

Incidentally, oatmeal and several other synths use the antiphase method of PWM, which means when you do PWM on a Sawtooth, you're actually ending up with a normal variable pulse wave. There's no way to actually *do* Saw PWM because none of the waveforms produce that shape when summed with their antiphase.

Zebra and Zebralette can do pretty much every method of PWM - antiphase, symmetry changing, and custom waveforms. You can even combine them :phones:
http://sendy.bandcamp.com/releases < My new album at Bandcamp! Now pay what you like!

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Poly-Ana can PWM all waveshapes. It can also modulate oscillator amplitude, frequency, destination (mix to the two filters), phase, and waveform (the waveforms continuously "tween" between the 4 fundamental waveshapes, sine, triangle, saw and square).

Very powerful.

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http://www.admiralquality.com/products/Poly-Ana/

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The Synthix Saw PWM reminds me the most of the D-series type. Roland got a little tricky with the sawtooth wave in those synths. Its actually a sine wave that has half of it's duty cycle flipped upside down, which now was an exact copy of the first half cycle. The result sounded close enough to a sawtooth to be usable, but the frequency ended up being effectively doubled. That's why the pitch goes up an octave when you select the [SAW] instead of [SQU] setting on the oscillator edit page.
The interesting thing about using PWM is the fact that it made the duty cycle halves uneven (if the sine wave hadn't been flipped, it would have sounded suspiciously like Casio's PD synths). What you would hear when you changed the pulsewith parameter was that all of a sudden a lower octave would creep in. At very small settings the oscillator sounded a bit like it there were two sawtooth waves an octave apart. At higher settings you got a bright (even alias-y) sawtooth approximation that was now an octave lower.
A couple of patches made use of this phenomenon (like Pressure Me Lead in the original factory bank) to simulate a guitar-like feedback.

Now that I think about it, though, Free Alpha can do something very similar:

Set both OSC1 waveforms to Sawtooth and set the balance all the way to A. Now set the A wave to 8" and the B wave to 16". Lastly, set a slot on the matrix to target Osc 1 Symmetry and pick a modulation source of your choice. Then, all you have to do is increase the value to taste, and voila: A bright asymmetrical sawtooth wave that drops an octave when modulation is not zero (this works on all of the Linplug synths with this kind of oscillator BTW).

Give it a try, it might sound very familiar...

STV

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What do you think about this?

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