Urs & Co. (Please release a full blown wavetable synth already)

[foosnark]

To me, wavetable technology itself, in its basic form is not very interesting.

I say that as a big fan of some hardware wavetable gear -- I beta tested SynthTech E352 and E370, and E370 remains my most-used sound source by far. (I literally just went through my gear notes as I always do at the end of album production, figure out what I'm leaning on the hardest and what's gathering dust.)

E370 has its really lush Cloud mode, great FM and phase modulation options, a wavefolder and so on and is excellent at modulating itself. It has this whole library of content online and a great cross-platform application for importing/editing/creating wave banks, but I typically stick to a handful of banks that start with a sine or triangle and move into richer harmonics.

Other Eurorack alternatives leverage lo-fi playback, or the ability to address the wavetable with an external audio rate signal, as ways to spice things up.

In VST form, there's Serum which has a decent unison mode and some ways to add audio-rate modulation; there's Massive which uses wavetables among other things in a more subtractive synth context, and various other options. And of course people have pointed out Zebra already. The world is not lacking for good wavetable synths.

[spunkmuffin]

what's iOS?

idiots On Speed?

[Examigan]

Samples as OSC (and as modulator source) are what i would like to have also in every synth.
I did some crazy modulations with some super synths and playing with different noise etc. and after 30 minutes i realized that i had much better results when i just recorded the toilet flushing and imported that in a tiny iOS synth which can load 32 sound sources and do kind of vector synthesis on steroids.
It´s not always about the best filters, raw OSC´s and FX (in this case i still prefer P900 over everything else yet), sometimes it´s just simple to get a unique sounds without all that bells and whistles.
Not sure why but recently i find most new desktop synths a bit boring and especially no fun to use. I even was shocked about myself that i´m more interested in a hopefully soon coming new iOS synth than Zebra 3 (i will get for free).
Yeah, i know it sounds crazy, but it is like it is. Of course in a month i could think the opposite again
Midlife crisis and so....

what's iOS?

https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-11/

[generaldiomedes]

Wave tables are good for those without the time, tools or inclination to build the same wave transitions from scratch. I guess they are like a secondary synth in that regard.

[Urs]

Zebra and http://synthtech.com/waveedit/ are all I need to explore wavetable synthesis. The tool imports serum wavs and exports zebra osc presets. The editor is open source and has a ton of options to make all sorts of fun transitions.

It exports Zeeb Osc presets?!? WTF?!? Why don't I know about his?

[chk071]

Wave tables are good for those without the time, tools or inclination to build the same wave transitions from scratch.

Sort of. As i mentioned above, i wouldn't at all mind a waveshaping synth, which can use snapshots of the waveforms the waveshaping creates, to build wavetables, though. I should really file a patent application for that idea. (not that i really think noone ever thought of that... guess most wavetable editors more or less do the same anyway. Would be cool nonethelss to have that built in straight into the synth)

I think i remember someone mentioning that was possible in Zebra anyway. I always forget such things.

[Urs]

Hmmm... I have an idea regarding Wavetables. Gimme two months and either I'll get back to you (it worked), or I don't (it didn't).

[Examigan]

Hmmm... I have an idea regarding Wavetables. Gimme two months and either I'll get back to you (it worked), or I don't (it didn't).

I look forward to that, as there are already many regular/standard wavetable synths out there.

[spunkmuffin]

It's funny , my impression from hearing various demos of the SynthTech E370 is that it sounds almost too smooth. I still want one though.

Isn't a table of waves essentially a sample? So in a sense a wavetable synth is actually a type of sampler. A sampler with filters, an envelope and effects. 'Wavetable synth' is just a fancy name for a sampler. So fake.

[cron]

I couldn't believe it when I first discovered that Serum cannot interpolate between waves. I thought that was such a basic wavetable function. I also don't particularly like Serums re-synthesis.

I've trashed Serum's sound quality when moving the wavetable position quite enough on these forums (though I inevitably sing praises about workflow in the same breath), so it's only fair that I mention the resynthesis (assuming you mean importing audio to WTs) is enormously improved in the latest pre-release. All that's changed is the addition of a new function called "set phases: this frame to all". Reliably removes the 'phase drift' across tables that used to occur on even seemingly simple material using time domain import. FFT import still suffers from horror amplitude modulation (?) artifacting across the table - but TD import reveals itself to be surprisingly good once phase drift is dealt with. The WT import functionality is so much more usable now.

Check in the forums as it's not in the download area yet. Rock solid on my machine (as Serum always has been over countless updates/betas since v1.0), and its about as essential as a synth update gets.

And, I say this every time, the only reason I'm so intimately familiar with Serum's quirks is because I use it so much. It's still one of my favourite synths ever made, the developer is ultra-engaged when it comes to comments and questions, and I'd drop the cash again in a heartbeat.

[pdxindy]

Zebra and http://synthtech.com/waveedit/ are all I need to explore wavetable synthesis. The tool imports serum wavs and exports zebra osc presets. The editor is open source and has a ton of options to make all sorts of fun transitions.

I just downloaded the Mac version 1.1 - Don't see how to export Zebra Osc presets.

[foosnark]

It's funny , my impression from hearing various demos of the SynthTech E370 is that it sounds almost too smooth. I still want one though.

It's pretty easy to make it dirty. You can turn off phase interpolation and wave interpolation, and modulate it all to hell.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Zebra and http://synthtech.com/waveedit/ are all I need to explore wavetable synthesis. The tool imports serum wavs and exports zebra osc presets. The editor is open source and has a ton of options to make all sorts of fun transitions.

I just downloaded the Mac version 1.1 - Don't see how to export Zebra Osc presets.

I was checking this out last night. Best I could figure is you'd use this to create the waveforms, then export as .wav, then use something like Wav to Zebra to actually get it to work. Unless I'm missing something. Exporting Zebra Osc presets directly from the application would be great, but I didn't see it either.

That said, Wave Edit seems like an interesting tool for coming up with soome fun raw waveforms.

[bmrzycki]

Zebra and http://synthtech.com/waveedit/ are all I need to explore wavetable synthesis. The tool imports serum wavs and exports zebra osc presets. The editor is open source and has a ton of options to make all sorts of fun transitions.

I just downloaded the Mac version 1.1 - Don't see how to export Zebra Osc presets.

I was checking this out last night. Best I could figure is you'd use this to create the waveforms, then export as .wav, then use something like Wav to Zebra to actually get it to work. Unless I'm missing something. Exporting Zebra Osc presets directly from the application would be great, but I didn't see it either.

That said, Wave Edit seems like an interesting tool for coming up with soome fun raw waveforms.

It seems I misremembered the workflow, sorry about that. I forgot I had to add http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 9#p6147139 in bwtween wavedit and zebra. I just tried it again after about three months and looked through my notes. Being open source I’ve toyed with sending a pull request to the wavedit author to export the format directly. Never enoug time in the day...

[bmrzycki]

(Duplicate post.)