Would love opinions on Live's Wavetable synth

[killmaster]

This must have been in the pipeline for a few years and I guess they reach the no turn back phase and said f#ck it! Cause quite frankly, I dont hear any wavetables being used anymore in music now with the exception of an occasional pop track with a distorted bass drone or some future bass stuff. Now music is much cleaner and dubstep is dead

What the hell? Wavetable synthesis was around 25 years before Dubstep even became a thing. The fact that a lot of garbage bandwagon producers used Serum to make the exact same kind of fart noises doesn't say anything about the merits of Wavetable synthesis.

+1

[Daru925]

I think the most important thing to remember from this thread is that live's Wavetable is perfectly capable of producing wonderful sounds.

[generaldiomedes]

It has loads of character AND doesn’t take anywhere near as much CPU as Serum.

It indeed sounds great but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's light on CPU.

[Ingonator]

Live 10 Suite is available since today and today i got the preordered upgrade which i have installed now.
While i had done a lot of plugin beta testing i almost never use Betas of DAWs/hosts so i did not use the new Live 10 wavetable synth so far.

At a first look this one seems to be quite promising and sound wise i like it.

As someone who owns a big amount of other wavetable synths i do not see that the new Live Wavetable synth will fully replace any of them but a new synth is not always about replacing others.
The Live Wavetable synth might not have a ton of features compared to some of the other wavetable synths i own but those that are included should offer creating a lot of really nice patches with it.
It did not seem to be done to include every possible feature but being a solid workhorse synth and that's how i see this too.
The currently included wavetables collection seems to be a good starting point for doing a lot of different sounds.

With synths that offer creating custom wavetables (like Icarus and Serum) i often get lost trying to create new wavetables instead of actually creating full patches based on what i alraedy have.
That might be a reason why with synths that have a fixed collection of wavetables (e.g. PPG Wave 2.V, PPG Wave 3.V, Largo) i did get a bigger amount of patches more easy than with synths that offer doing custom wavetables. It's a matter of trying to focus on the important things which IMO is more difficult if you have too many options.

The Live Wavetable synth also has a global Unison with different modes and up to 8 voices. While the Unison increases the CPU load this synth does not really seem to kill your CPU. In normal use the CPU use seems to be quite low.

[timwest]

Personally I'm loving ableton's new wavetable synth. It's great! In fact, I'm considering selling my copy of Serum, as I'm liking the sound quality and UI of Ableton's wavetable much more.

First and foremost, I judge a synth by the quality of its sound. I know a lot of synths that have insane amounts of tweakability and features, but don't sound good. I'm not trying to say Serum sounds bad; but the sound isn't what I'm looking for. Serum has a bright, almost cold, digital sound. I'm a fan of lush, warm synths. I feel like Ableton's wavetable has a much more colourful, lush and warmer sound. (sorry if I'm sounding a bit airy fairy here). Now I can't explain this theoretically, but I'm guessing this has something to do with better filters (Serum's sound rubbish), it's unison mode (I particularly like shimmer, classic and phase sync), and overall sound engine.

Sure, serum may be more tweakable and have more features; but I feel like most of these additional features aren't particularly musical and I wouldn't use them in my sounds. I feel like wavetable has very musical sounding features, which makes it easier to dial in a great patch.

In my opinion I feel like wavetable tends to sit better in the mix than serum, which could be attributed to serum's bright character.

[CrystalWizard]

IMO all wavetable synths sound a bit cold and edgy, it's the nature of the architecture. Some have smoother interpolating algorithms and better filters.

[Ingonator]

The new Ableton wavetable synth was one of the few synths that i already really liked just after playing with it for less than 30 minutes.
FWIW with Serum it took me around 2 or 3 years of testing the demo version until i finally bought it and actually i hated it at the beginning...

The sound of Ableton Wavetable is indeed very nice. It is not really a feature monster but still has a solid set of features to get a lot of your own patches from it. The collection of included wavetables which is one of the most important parts wit hwavetable synths seems to be very nice and quite versatile too.

Being fully integrated with Live 10 of course you could make this a lot more complex using the built-in effects and the Max 4 Live devices in Live 10 Suite. Mapping M4L modulation devices to Ableton'S own instruments is very simple. Finally having M4L fully integrated in Live 10 is a nice addition too.
You can also save complex setups with a Live Rack that can also include more than one Ableton instrument as a layer (e.g. a layer with the Sampler, Analog and/or Operator instruments).

I do not see this a a replacement for the bunch of other wavetable synths i own but it seems to be great on it'S own and it might become a true "workhorse" synth for me in the future (while i would still use other wavetable syntsh too).

[zzz00m]

dubstep is dead

Ding dong ...

[sqigls]

An article comparing Wavetable and Serum...
https://subaqueousmusic.com/serum-vs-ab ... wavetable/

Preset Tutorial Video....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qZPdVdhyfk