How do you go about sampling wavetables?

[chk071]

As the title says, i want to sample a synth's wavetables, and convert them to a format another synth can read. I found a tutorial online, which is for Blamsoft's Expanse synth, here: http://blamsoft.com/tutorials/expanse-c ... avetables/

Even though it's pretty well written, there are a couple of things which are unclear to me: How do you figure out which note (to play) is ideal for my DAW? Also, when i sample the wavetable, how can i extract thesingle waveforms optimally, and find the right phase/start point? As far as i understood, there could be an issue with the start/end point, when the synth interpolates between the single waveforms in the wavetable. Also, what do i do when the wavetable i sample has 127 waves, but the synth only supports wavetables with up to 64 waveforms?

Hope someone can help.

[AnX]

which synth are you going to sample?

[chk071]

I want to sample Waldorf Largo.

[AnX]

shame, i dont have that, so cant help with info on the samples themselves

edit: what synth do you want to put them in?

[chk071]

edit: what synth do you want to put them in?

That's a good question actually. I planned to put them into Dune 3, but, my demo runs out in 20 days or so, and i don't have another synth which lets me import wavetables. Let's rather say i'm interested in general how people go about creating wavetables. There's literally no info about that on the net. At least i didn't find much.

[AnX]

gimme a mo and I'll explain...

[AnX]

OK....

i dont know anything about conversion apps, so doing it maually is a long process, as you will need to sample and edit each waveform from each WT, so say 128 wavefrorms from a single WT...very time consuming

Dune uses wavs that are 2048 sam0les long 16/44

this im told, is 21.5332 Hz. This corresponds to F0 detuned by 24 cents at 44.1 kHz

so you need an init preset in Largo, and record that note for each waveform, then make sure you get a zero crossing etc etc when editing

once you have sampled all the waveforms, you load then into Dune and save as a WT...

so, unless anyone knows of a special tool app to speed up the process, its gonna take a while

[chk071]

Ok, thanks for that. I'll see if i can do it that way.

Wonder what happens when you load more than 64 waveforms in Dune's wavetable editor. Does it create some interpolated waveforms then or something?

[AnX]

In D3 you can load 256 waveforms

[chk071]

Yeah, but what happens with the other waveforms, when it converts to a 64 wave wavetable? Or is the 64 waveform restriction obsolete?

[AnX]

obsolete, as i said its now 256

[chk071]

Thanks. That's great.

[fmr]

edit: what synth do you want to put them in?

That's a good question actually. I planned to put them into Dune 3, but, my demo runs out in 20 days or so, and i don't have another synth which lets me import wavetables. Let's rather say i'm interested in general how people go about creating wavetables. There's literally no info about that on the net. At least i didn't find much.

Lots of tutorials for Serum, and also for Wave Edit and Audio-Term. Wave Edit and Audio-Term are both free, and great platforms to create wavetables.

[chk071]

Yeah, but... when it comes to actual manual sampling, and editing, there's not much. Actually, i tend to sample the single waves now, and edit them all in Wavelab, because that seems like the most precise thing to do for me.

By accident, i stumbled on some interesting BTW. Largo has a "brilliance" parameter for the oscillators, which, according to the manual, gets you a closer sound to the older Waldorf hardware synthesizers. For example, the manual says that, with a setting of 64, it resembles the Q/MicroQ. When i imported the first waveform from one of the Q wavetables, i noticed that the waveform looked somehow quantized, meaning that there were steps in the waveform. I also saw that in the oscilloscope, when checking afterwards. So, it seems like what the "brilliance" parameter does is actually to degrade the waveform, to create harmonics. I guess the resolution was simply lower in their older synths (less processing power in the DSP's etc.), thus making them sound grittier/more aliasing. Actually, i'm wondering whether i should or should not leave it at a setting of 64. After all, that's what they sounded like in the Q, according to the manual. It surely creates some interesting harmonics.

[aciddose]

I just dump the process memory. You'll likely find the PCM format samples whether in raw format (like .wav?) or floating point or whatever else along with names, loop points, tuning, key maps and so on.

This is slightly advanced reversing but it is "still in diapers" level, so anyone with enough dedication can learn to do it. Try finding a "heap walker" tool that allows you to browse the heap allocations of a process and dump those blocks into files. Also it would help if you write your own "host" as an extremely bare-bones shell application so you have essentially a stand-alone plug-in instance allocated with a minimum number of system libraries mapped which greatly simplifies things.

I'm extremely picky about these things though.

For example years ago we talked about D50 and M1 ROMs... since then I've dumped these successfully and reverse engineered a majority of their code/structures. Recently I've been working on an alpha juno ROM to allow me to make modifications to disable the "all notes off" on last note-off and re-map the pedals. I'm 80% of the way there, the hard part has actually been finding a reliable source for re-writable EPROMs to use while debugging so I may need to create an adapter using a modern SMD eprom to fit in the firmware ROM socket.

https://soundcloud.com/aciddose-1/jim1
https://soundcloud.com/aciddose-1/stringitize

Unfortunately what I've personally found after achieving this? The samples are god awful garbage and it wasn't anywhere near worth the effort.

As far as "alpha juno as a controller"... an interesting pass-time but realistically way more efficient to just use a real controller. The alpha juno board sucks.