Dawesome Kontrast. Wavetable synth. Coming Autumn 2025.

[zerocrossing]

This is plain and simply the stupidest sentiment I’ve read on this forum for a long time.

Who kidnapped zerocrossing and gave him bones’ personality?

He came out of the Upside Down and infected me.

Image 3.jpeg

[whassup]

Yeah, we all have our thresholds for all kinds of non linearities.
More multi band distortion on my flute, OK?
To me the name is program: Kontrast.
Owning way to many synthesizers to even having heard quite a few thousands of the presets that came with them I ask myself typical anti GAS questions: Seriously? Why? Is it better? Does it do something different than XYZ? Etc.
Kontrast is my current synth ingredient to evolving, moving and unusual textures.
By textures I mean characteristics that are not so easily achieved with a lot of other synths.
Something that sounds rather like samples but hey, they are not. This is a synth. Exciting.
Aliasing: Yes, it does. So do other plugins.
Oversampling is the remedy. Again.
Yes, it is not the synth that is running with 200 voices on my yesteryear win95 machine.
And I am OK with that.
A Prophet 5 has 5 voices. FIVE. Awesome machine!
And Kontrast does so many cool things which are still to be explored.
The filters sound awesome to me!
And then there are the modal filters. Brilliant.
While it is scaringly deep you can see quite a few restrictions to make the synth managable. Intuitive.
Like with plain FM a lot of parameters are not so straight forward as a filter cutoff.
Sometimes that machine is just freaking out like an electric guitar with feedback.
Wow, that was unpredictable. But soo soo nice!
Yeah, this is why I currently dig Kontrast so much.
Lotsa textures that I can add as a layer to other rather conventional sounds from other synths.
My 3.5 cents.
Your milage may vary.
Good.

[swilow11]

OK, I've confirmed my suspicions. The standard oscillator is fine, but the wavetable oscillator is basically horrible as soon as you modulate X or Size. I mean, like ridiculously bad. Is no one else hearing it? Just init a preset, fix the stupid EG settings, set the balance to Oscillator 1 and then start messing with X and size and play some higher notes. I start hearing it at C4. Could this be a bug? It's very prominent.

I'm not necessarily hearing aliasing but I think the way Kontrast interpolates between necessarily discontinuous spectral content causes a bit of harshness that I don't necessarily love. This can be smoothed over a bit though.

I still find it quite unmusical when modulating the Y axis or changing the size parameter- gets very thin which I guess is to be expected. But beefing this up with unison, the "analogue" oscillator and the modal filter does something nice. However, I think a synth where I'm spending a lot of time trying to smooth over its inherent character is suggestive of something.

I feel sort of mixed but find myself continuously opening it and losing a few hours. To me, it's more of a pad/drone/texture machine which I love but personally I prefer Abyss which is one of my favourite unique synthesisers. I do love the slow modulation option- bouncing out a few minutes of this and snipping out some interesting happy accidents and either reimporting into Kontrast or into Serums spectral oscillator is great.

[zerocrossing]

OK, I've confirmed my suspicions. The standard oscillator is fine, but the wavetable oscillator is basically horrible as soon as you modulate X or Size. I mean, like ridiculously bad. Is no one else hearing it? Just init a preset, fix the stupid EG settings, set the balance to Oscillator 1 and then start messing with X and size and play some higher notes. I start hearing it at C4. Could this be a bug? It's very prominent.

I'm not necessarily hearing aliasing but I think the way Kontrast interpolates between necessarily discontinuous spectral content causes a bit of harshness that I don't necessarily love. This can be smoothed over a bit though.

I still find it quite unmusical when modulating the Y axis or changing the size parameter- gets very thin which I guess is to be expected. But beefing this up with unison, the "analogue" oscillator and the modal filter does something nice. However, I think a synth where I'm spending a lot of time trying to smooth over its inherent character is suggestive of something.

I feel sort of mixed but find myself continuously opening it and losing a few hours. To me, it's more of a pad/drone/texture machine which I love but personally I prefer Abyss which is one of my favourite unique synthesisers. I do love the slow modulation option- bouncing out a few minutes of this and snipping out some interesting happy accidents and either reimporting into Kontrast or into Serums spectral oscillator is great.

Abyss is really great. Love that one because of how it obscures controls in an interesting way and forces you to experiment, but still gives you some traditional parameters to shape the sound. Not a synth to go to when you have something in mind, but great for when you want to be surprised.

Maybe Dawesome can implement some sort of "clean" mode in the future that will eliminate, or at least push up to much higher frequencies, the artifacts that are bothering me. If not, no biggie. There are so many amazing options, like the aforementioned Serum and its wavetable and spectral oscillators that I'm definitely not starved for cool sounds.

[PetVor]

[...]
Maybe Dawesome can implement some sort of "clean" mode in the future that will eliminate, or at least push up to much higher frequencies, the artifacts that are bothering me.
[...]

There is ...
* the "M" switch below the CIRCLE to eliminate the artefacts when using small SIZE
* you can also use CIRCLE at full and FLAT to avoid these artefacts
* the "S" switch below X for smoothing along the X-Axis.
* the BLUR to remove artefacts engraved in the wavetable itself

In general (has nothing to do with Kontrast):
When importing a wavetable it is better to use low pitched sounds: a C4 at 48khz sampling rate has roughly 180 samples per cycle. Good quality wavetables use 2048 samples per cycle. Of course this gets interpolated, but it also means that only every 10th sample is original, everything else is interpolated.

[koalaboy]

In general (has nothing to do with Kontrast):
When importing a wavetable it is better to use low pitched sounds: a C4 at 48khz sampling rate has roughly 180 samples per cycle. Good quality wavetables use 2048 samples per cycle. Of course this gets interpolated, but it also means that only every 10th sample is original, everything else is interpolated.

Does this mean that usually you would want to use a sample that is close to the lower half of planned playing ? As if you play a large range, wouldn't more samples of the single cycle be skipped at higher frequencies any way (in the same way lower 'missing' samples will be interpolated) ?

In some ways, your example of 48Khz suggests that sampling at F#0 would be the best fit for maximum 'samples per cycle' (my maths may be dubious...) but I suspect there are reasons why this is not a good idea either ?

Genuinely curious what the ideal way to approach this usually is (if we ignore the 'looks pretty' approach, that I currently use )

[PetVor]

Your "looks pretty" approach, balanced with "sounds pretty" is a perfect valid strategy.
In the first place Kontrast is designed especially for that approach!

However, if you want to have faithful reproduction of waveforms, for example a sawtooth, then it is indeed best to use a sample with very low pitch, for various reasons:

* samples are always band-limited. When you have a sawtooth and pitch it down it sounds dull, as the highest partials are missing (they are not present in the original, bandlimited, higher pitched sample)

* the bandlimitation creates "ripples" in the waveform, also known as "gibbs phenomenon". In nonlinear wavetable synthesis these ripples create (unwanted) high frequency changes in the wavetable, that will be heavily amplified if you use things like PHASE, PETALS, SYNC etc

* you want to have best representation of that waveform - meaning: as many samples as possible per cycle. The higher the frequency the lower the amount of samples per cycle

[kraster]

In general (has nothing to do with Kontrast):
When importing a wavetable it is better to use low pitched sounds: a C4 at 48khz sampling rate has roughly 180 samples per cycle. Good quality wavetables use 2048 samples per cycle. Of course this gets interpolated, but it also means that only every 10th sample is original, everything else is interpolated.

Does this mean that usually you would want to use a sample that is close to the lower half of planned playing ? As if you play a large range, wouldn't more samples of the single cycle be skipped at higher frequencies any way (in the same way lower 'missing' samples will be interpolated) ?

In some ways, your example of 48Khz suggests that sampling at F#0 would be the best fit for maximum 'samples per cycle' (my maths may be dubious...) but I suspect there are reasons why this is not a good idea either ?

Genuinely curious what the ideal way to approach this usually is (if we ignore the 'looks pretty' approach, that I currently use )

It's more to do with the per frame resolution.

A single wavetable frame is derived from analysing a certain period of a sample in order to make a single periodic wave that represents the spectral content of that sample period.

You can use autocorrelation, zero crossing or FFT shenanigans to find the best fit per frame. Each frame is effectively a timbral snapshot. A wavetable with multiple frames is scanning through multiple timbral snapshots.

Because you're working with a fixed frame size the more you "fill" that frame the less it has to interpolate. When you are playing higher notes in a wavetable frame all you're doing is changing the playback speed. You are still cycling through the same period but at any pitch there is less interpolation to do.

Wavetable frames derived from higher pitched samples can start to show weird behaviors at lower pitches than the original sample's pitch. It's similar to conceptually to time stretching. Whatever interpolation method you are using within the frame is ultimately making a "best guess".

This gets even trickier when you have multiple frames like you have in a typical wavetable because it also has to interpolate across frames. With less information per frame the interpolation between frames will also start to exhibit weirdness.

[kraster]

OK, I've confirmed my suspicions. The standard oscillator is fine, but the wavetable oscillator is basically horrible as soon as you modulate X or Size. I mean, like ridiculously bad. Is no one else hearing it? Just init a preset, fix the stupid EG settings, set the balance to Oscillator 1 and then start messing with X and size and play some higher notes. I start hearing it at C4. Could this be a bug? It's very prominent.

I'm not necessarily hearing aliasing but I think the way Kontrast interpolates between necessarily discontinuous spectral content causes a bit of harshness that I don't necessarily love. This can be smoothed over a bit though.

I still find it quite unmusical when modulating the Y axis or changing the size parameter- gets very thin which I guess is to be expected. But beefing this up with unison, the "analogue" oscillator and the modal filter does something nice. However, I think a synth where I'm spending a lot of time trying to smooth over its inherent character is suggestive of something.

I feel sort of mixed but find myself continuously opening it and losing a few hours. To me, it's more of a pad/drone/texture machine which I love but personally I prefer Abyss which is one of my favourite unique synthesisers. I do love the slow modulation option- bouncing out a few minutes of this and snipping out some interesting happy accidents and either reimporting into Kontrast or into Serums spectral oscillator is great.

I look on the Y axis as having two very distinct modes. With wrap off it seems to zero or fade out the frame samples that are not under the playhead. That can sound quite buzzy but it has its uses.

With wrap on it becomes more like phase shifting/modulation. You have the same magnitude within the frame but altering the Y alters the phase. Modulating that gives you a kind of pitch shifting effect.

One of the best uses for me is a combination of small size and modulating the y axis as you're scanning across the wavetable. You can get some really awesome rhythms just by swapping out the wavetable.

[p1afff]

———

[jbraner]

Sorry if this has already been mentioned - but I couldn't find it
In the filter section - what exactly is the second filter?
Is it the same type as what you choose for filter 1?
I can set the cutoff freq and resonance, and put it in series or parallel with filter 1 - but what is it?

[whassup]

Yeah, they are two LP filters. You set their character together. Nothing more and nothing less.

[jbraner]

OK thanks. That's what I thought, but I've never seen anything like this (one choice for both filters)

[kraster]

OK thanks. That's what I thought, but I've never seen anything like this (one choice for both filters)

I don't think that's true.

I think filter one is variable in its character and filter 2 is a fixed type.

The tooltip says the second filter is multimode but as far as I can tell it's another LP filter.

FIlter 2 seems gentler than any of the modes of filter 1 and it doesn't self oscillate when resonance is pushed.

[jbraner]

I wonder if anyone who knows for sure can chime in.