Wavetable Synthesis

[jmg8]

OK, Guys I wanted to open a discussion about wavetable synthesis possibilities inside of MPowerSynth. I would like to hear other peoples opinions, ideas etc.

I personally used massive for a long time, then moved to serum. Now MXXX is here with MPowerSynth inside it, I want to uninstall all other plugins and use exclusively Melda (for backwards compatability, consistency and OCD reasons)
However as much as I LOVE MPowerSynth I keep finding myself wanting to open serum to import or pick two or more waveforms and then spectrally morph between them. It's great for creating monster/growling/vocal type Basses. I know that MPowerSynth would be capable of this as it already has the spectral engine, I just want more importing and morphing options.

So a few questions for the community:

Is there a way that I'm missing where I can import two single cycle wave forms and spectrally morph between them?

Is there a way to import a longer sample/wavetable and scan through it (like a wavetable, single cycle at a time)?

How do the import options work? and how do they differ from each other? As in normal mode vs harmonic mode. Do they use an average of the whole sample? Can I select where in the sample the single cycle is taken from? It is not clear enough from reading the manual.

When importing a single cycle wave into normal mode, why are all the cool morphing to custom shape and step sequencer now disabled?

Does anyone else have these same needs, or any other similar ideas?

Thanks,

[zerocrossing]

I asked this same question once and was told that is was possible and given a description of how to do it. I tried and totally got lost and gave up after a little while. If there is indeed a good way to do this, it's far to clumsily implemented to make it worth moving away from Serum to do. It is one feature I really wish Melda would polish up in Mpowersynth.

[kokotte]

Hi jmg8,
forgot about WT, in MPS, you have a lot of better option:
make a shape or (custom shape or step shape) and morph your point with the modulator(try different setting for aliasing,sideband),
second, and it why M power is so powerfull, make a simple sine wave in the additive editor for 2 osc or 3, fm that with the "B mode", and automate the volume of some new harmonic, and you growl like a B.....try to automate the phase to, 32 step in the additive editor is good for me and don't forget to move the transform osc(PWM,sync W......unisson) and enjoy( you can put a vocoder in the fx section too for the hight freq,(think vocodex )for a classic fm formant the pitch autom with fm work perfectly (i come from sytrus and i spend my day making some crazy dubstep fm sound with MPS)
tell me if it work for you:)

[jmg8]

Yes, great features and ideas. I already use all of these features, which is why i love MPS. However I want to discuss the above questions about importing and wavetable morphing.

Custom shape is a great feature but it is not really intended to mimic an existing waveform as this would be very difficult to draw in. It's much easier to import a wave form. For example serum has hundreds of waveforms that can emulate classic hardware and real-world instruments etc. then you can morph between them. Try drawing one of those waves into the custom editor and it will sound nothing alike.

[vectorwarrior]

I'm with you, I love the wavetable features in Serum. For me, it almost needs to be a different synth as Power Synth isn't really geared towards the amount of unique controls required for serum level control over the wavetables. I mean, you could add it to power synth, but it's already a complex synth with a lot of functionality hidden away, adding this to it will make that situation worse. I'd be happy to use it, but i fear it would get lost or underutilized, whereas with Serum, all the stuff can be up front because it's focus.

[jmg8]

Yes, I agree. The focus with serum and mps is chalk and cheese. Serum is almost on one page which is a pleasure to use but sometimes lacks the options and depth on favour of workflow. Whereas mps has lots of pages and options and at no point tries to cut back or simplify things, so with this logic I see no reason why another page or set of options would be a bad thing. After all it is aimed at the power user. I just want a one stop synth that ends the need for any other synth. Even just a few extra option for importing and morphing would be great.

Maybe:....

Add an option in the load sample area to select where the wave is taken from.

And an option in the mix section (the fm and ring mod bit in osc 2/3) to spectral morph between two oscillators. These morph options are already available in MVocoder.

[MeldaProduction]

Well, I'll be honest here, you know me . When this came up in the beginning, I was like "yeah, the serum looks cool". But then I tried and I was sooo disappointed. All the nice graphics and whatnot, but the wavetable synthesis is just, well, like waveshaping . It's an oldschool technology from times this was the only option, because the computing power was just well limited. And yeah, you can morph between the shapes, so for modulation it is useful, but in a way it sounds the same every time... The thing is, a single wave only describes the levels of harmonics, so technically you can do the same thing with the harmonic mode (except the number of harmonics is limited there).

Anyway what I actually liked about Serum were the transformations, that's why quite many more transformations are now in MPowerSynth , in each oscillator. This technically does more than wavetables and it's easy to use (which is aproblem with oscillator shapes of course - it's as powerful as it can be, but not easy to use for this and takes quite some CPU).

So, basically, no wavetable synthesis will happen here. For me is obsolete. But it will be in MYYY when that happens, that will take quite some time. I'd like that one to have everything , at least almost .

For the record - some food for though - with multiple MPowerSynth instances in FX section you can actually do quite some things - like vocoding one with the other (that's similar to spectral morphing) etc. Quite more creative than never ending use of the same wavetables...grrr...

[jmg8]

Well it wouldn't be the same wavetables as you can morph between any wave forms, even imported. Glad to hear that it is coming to MYYY.
I like the idea of using MVocoder to morph between two instances of MPS, cool!
Also I heard there are some other morph stuff on the way?

[Grizzellda]

So how would you guys define spectral synthesis anyhow? When I hear that term I think of whooshing, sweeping harmonic movement - is this close? Sweeping harmonics is a broad concept though, and I may not know exactly what I'm talking about! Anyone care to throw in some ideas?

And how would it relate to morphing? I mean real morphing between sounds, not just volume fade ins/outs.

And Vojtech, what kind of computer are you using to develop with? You got a Haswell CPU? How much RAM? Any opinions on Windows 10? I'm gonna stay on 7 for awhile.

[MeldaProduction]

Morph: Yeah, playing with the idea . There are sooooo many possibilities to morph between 2 audio signals in spectral domain... The sad result is that it will have latency, no way around it...

Spectral synthesis: Well, most audio folks don't understand that the waveforms we are used to watch don't visually show almost any information, just volume pretty much... In spectral domain the limits are almost endless as this is kind of how humans perceive the sound, but humans perceive the time domain at the same time, so the brain kinda exceeds the functionality of every know algorithm . But working on it... And no, definitely not just fadeins/outs, grrrr

Computer: I actually have quite a few here. But the main workstation is 8core Xeon Haswell, on Windows 8.1, SSDs for everything of course. I'll probably upgrade to Windows 10 at some point, but the companies developing "pro audio interfaces" are generally extreme amateurs, so I doubt stable drivers will be that soon, so I'll wait for some time. I have Windows 10 on another computer. They are good, no problems so far. The "Cortana" thing is questionable, not sure if it's paranoid delusion or not .

[Chandlerhimself]

I was just about to post about this. I figured out a way to do it. It's sort of a workaround, but it does allow you to morph between up to 4 shapes. I'll try to explain it as best I can.

1). Import a single cycle wave form through the ocs section.
2). Press the down button above "harmonics". This will change your single cycle into a series of sine waves.
3). Adjust the number of partials until you are satisfied with the sound.
4). Press the "B" preset switch on the right hand side. and then repeat steps 1-3 with a new wave.
5). Now go to C and press the morph button.
6). Move between A and B and watch/hear the wave change.

Is it possible for us to get a feature that makes this easier. Of course now we can manually move all the partials, it would be nice to be able to scan though a few different sounds. One advantage of having this is it would allow people to make familiar massive or serum sounds. Of course MPowersynth can technically make massive style sounds now, it's extremely hard because you can't scan through wavetables.

[jmg8]

Cool, I like this idea, just had a play with it, kinda better in a way to morph between 4 waves, cool
Few notes though, the morphing interpolation that is used only uses the first 32 partials, so it you use more than that the upper ones just stay as they are. Also it would be nice if the A/B/C/D morpher could be modulated.

[ZentralmassivSound]

Few notes though, the morphing interpolation that is used only uses the first 32 partials, so it you use more than that the upper ones just stay as they are.

+1, that limits the morphing a little bit. Could that be extended to all 256, or does it blow up CPU and/or preset size?

[ZentralmassivSound]

BTW killer feature would be to have an import feature that analyzes a longer sample in certain moving window frames and creates banks for harmonics modulators from it.

[jmg8]

BTW killer feature would be to have an import feature that analyzes a longer sample in certain moving window frames and creates banks for harmonics modulators from it.

THIS.