Raw hardware oscillator samples

[PTV]

Try here, most of their libraries also have samples of the raw oscillators, with loop points and everything, and they are completely free (public domain):
https://github.com/publicsamples

thanks for that - I did take a look at that site before, but I didn't see any raw oscillator samples - only sampled full patches. I didn't dig too deep though, so will have another look.

It's the construction kits you're after:
https://github.com/publicsamples/Roland-Alpha-Juno
https://github.com/publicsamples/Modula ... uction-Kit
https://github.com/publicsamples/Moog-Minitaur
https://github.com/publicsamples/Oberhe ... -Session-1
https://github.com/publicsamples/Oberhe ... -Session-2
https://github.com/publicsamples/Roland ... uction-Kit

[aciddose]

It's very difficult to sample at the required level of detail directly from the oscillator itself to produce anything other than near mathematically perfect waveforms. The later stages are a combination of filters and non-linear buffers... but it's important to remember that the impact these have on the final output may not appear before the filter for instance.

Ultimately you need to look at the complete system and signal path and sample each point with a high impedance (like an oscilloscope probe + buffer circuit) to take accurate measurements. This requires disassembling synthesizers and delving deeply into great levels of detail with great effort.

There definitely are some variations (the 'good' tb-303 'pulse' being a classic one) with interesting properties but generally speaking these are non-static and change at different frequencies or when modulated.

The Alpha Juno for example I could provide samples from the lifted pin from the oscillator chip... but that would be wasted effort. I can tell you right now the only measurable difference from mathematical perfection is feed-through of the digital clock signal.

[aciddose]

My point being to explain why these sample sets aren't easy to find. They're 99% not useful.

I've looked through these to try to find technical analysis and audible differences in waveforms but I've almost always been very disappointed. Often poor quality samples taken through a long signal path after the output of the synthesizer. Usually including additional stages and effects and into a low quality line input on a sound card. In my experience I've found to get any practical use out of these requires a lot more than just samples themselves - it requires enough technical knowledge to synthesize those waveforms directly myself. In other words to really get any notable results I need to be able to write the math function that creates the waveform!

... and, that is easier said than done!

What you'll generally find is dozens of "saw" waveforms that are exactly alike. You'll find one or two that seem interesting and might look into how these shapes are created in the synthesizer in question. That'll almost inevitably lead to the discovery that the oscillator itself in that synthesizer produces a near perfect waveform up to the output... and that the person who sampled the thing used the headphone amp output which is what really produced the distortion!

[aciddose]

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:



Left/white = analog waveform (through the output, not raw from oscillator/mixer!)
Right/pink = digital recreation (from Xhip)

There are two remaining differences. Things you might note are the "flat top" of the waveform and the difference in ramp vs. pulse vs. sub. These are easy to explain.

The difference in amplitudes simply comes down to minor differences in mixer levels. I didn't bother to try to tweak it to perfection because I already know it's possible and I'd be wasting my time on something pointless. Obviously while you might set what you think is exactly "full" gain in a synthesizer, that doesn't mean it's "1.0" or 0 dB or anything remotely like that. It's just an arbitrary level where the knob/fader maxes out! In software like Xhip, obviously (I hope!) if you set exactly 0.0 dB that's exactly what you get!

The "flat top" is due to the DC blocking high-pass filter capacitor in the mixer/amplifier/output and later stages outside the synthesizer. If you sample a different frequency you'd find this varies. It turns out at this particular frequency and with the particular capacitors and other circuit elements in the analog synthesizer, this sample of this note at this moment in time just so happened to produce a very nearly "flat" top on the waveform. It's nothing but a 6 dB high-pass filter! In Xhip that was recreated by applying a 6 dB high-pass filter on the output.

Additionally the anti-aliasing filter in Xhip differs from the sound card filter. The sound card used a zero-phase filter while Xhip uses minimum phase. These differences aren't audible and amount to rounding error in most cases or ultra-sonic harmonic differences in others. Either way you won't be hearing the difference.

There is also an invisible phase difference between the sub-oscillator, ramp and pulse waveform in the analog synthesizer output vs. the perfect zero-phase alignment in Xhip. This could be modeled by very precise fine-tuning of tiny 1/100ths or less phase offsets for each to recreate a perfect identical spectrum... but again that would only model that exact particular instant in time in the sample and while notable has little to do with what makes the analog waveform "analog".

When you get into the nitty gritty details of these things they become more like a child's fascination with clouds in the sky, ripples in a pond, bark on a tree, moss on a stone or stars in the night sky. For someone who understands these things they no longer carry the same majesty they once did, much like staring at the paint on a wall!

Now let's all take the time to appreciate the sublime beauty of the textures left in the paint on the wall and become child-like and mystified in awe as we once may have been and forgot all those years ago.

I'm a spoil-sport, I know.

[Examigan]

Synthmaster 2 has a large number of them included.

[OneOfManyPauls]

@aciddose - always nice to be told why I shouldn't want the thing I want, why it's not useful to me, and with a nice dollop of condescension too. Thanks?

I'm not expecting waveforms taken at the circuit level - I'm just seeking waveforms that are as raw as practicably possible. Reasonable minds understand the request for what it is.

There is enough variation between these waveforms to have a material impact on the output from the sample/wavetable based synths I'm using them with.

I appreciate the links and files that have already been posted, that is definitely useful to me.

Synthmaster 2 has a large number of them included.

I have synthmaster 2 - I can't see the waveforms as individual samples, I trust they're all inside the "Factory Waveforms.smar" file, do you know of a way to access them other than resampling?

[Examigan]

Here's where I found them in my plugins folder:
VSTPlugins\SynthMaster\Resources\UserWaveforms\

[OneOfManyPauls]

brilliant, that helped me find them on my mac at: [HD]/Library/Application Support/KV331 Audio/SynthMaster/Resources/UserWaveforms - thanks

[aciddose]

@aciddose - always nice to be told why I shouldn't want the thing I want, why it's not useful to me, and with a nice dollop of condescension too. Thanks?

I'm not expecting waveforms taken at the circuit level - I'm just seeking waveforms that are as raw as practicably possible. Reasonable minds understand the request for what it is.

That's your personally biased interpretation of my intended meaning. My intended meaning is to say that you can far more trivially recreate these shapes on your own 100% within the software - once you understand all the factors at play.

They are not at all complicated or unique. There is nothing at all "analog" about them. So I'm telling you that to seek "analog oscillator waveforms" is a nonsense request. You ought to study these very simple factors (I described most of them in high detail) and find a synthesizer with the precise phase control and wave-shaping capabilities you need to create them yourself.

Unfortunately finding a synthesizer like that usually puts you into the domain of modulars with severe limitations on modules. It becomes incredibly difficult to find tools with the capability to reproduce these very simple waveforms. That is one of many reasons software still doesn't stack up against a simple analog synthesizer - the software isn't modeling 90% of the tiny "irrelevant" factors that make up the complete result.

If you do find a particular waveform you feel is very interesting I can offer to help you research how it was actually created. I think though that when you do get into these 100s of very similar waveforms you're stuck in the same sort of preset-flipping or channel-flipping mode, GAS gear acquisition syndrome and so on.

It's easy to get caught up with too much focus on these things when what you really want is a complete sound that satisfies you in your music. Collecting these samples or analyzing them couldn't be any further from creativity.

[aciddose]

Here's a small set of samples of the complete output (not from the oscillator!) from one of my many analogs I've built:
http://xhip.net/temp/archive/adxs1.zip

I removed most of the longer samples of modulated PWM but left in quite a few. If this archive were trimmed to single-cycle across five octaves or similar it would be around 256k or 512k maybe.

The pulse shaper in some synthesizers is actually taking the ramp input at an amplitude like 50x or +34 dB and hard-clipping it. To reproduce that shape accurately in software requires you to look at the actual curve of the ramp between the flat edges of the pulse where it's clipped.

Obviously if the ramped portion makes up 1/50th of the pulse, at very high frequencies that'll be one sample wide. At very low frequencies though you'll get a pulse with one sharp edge and one ramped edge: this adds some asymmetric even order harmonics and the overall pulse gets "softer" in tone at lower bass frequencies and sub frequencies like 30 Hz. That pulse shaper circuit is present in most of the Roland SH- synthesizers and many many other brands but each one has slightly different amplitudes, they use slightly different opamps and so on, so the exact ratios are very slightly varied.

This is the same source of uniqueness as for the Roland TB-303 pulse which is clipped using a pair of transistors and both a high-pass and low-pass filter in the shaper itself.

The MS-10 and -20 triangle shaper circuits along with the Moog triangle shaper (and similar in many other synthesizer brands) use a very simple high-pass filter and phase-splitter made from only an opamp or a few transistors and capacitors. This produces very nearly a perfect triangle at high frequencies but as you get lower more of the imperfect edge of the ramp waveform ends up in the middle of the triangle which makes it "buzz" at low frequencies.

The MS-10 and -20 (and many other) ramp waveforms are passed through a FET buffer which saturates and soft-clips one side of the waveform. This has little audible impact on its own, but further through the circuits it leads to asymmetric pulses from pulse shapers and DC biased asymmetric shapes in filters and amplifiers. The circuit I've used in the ADXS1 is almost identical to the Korg MS-10 but my circuit is designed to emphasize this imperfection... although if you look at the ramp waveform I included you'll see the particular bias on the FET transistor in that case was very low and had no measurable impact on the ramp shape at all!

The same tiny variations accumulate when you're using hardware synthesizers, effects, mixer consoles and miles of patch cables. Each knob is going to produce a slightly different resistance or level even when in a microscopically identical position visually.

On and on and on and on none of this makes my music any better or creates any inspiration.

[aciddose]

Also I know I'm using "analog" here rather than "hardware" but they pretty much are the same thing. There are a lot of weird little factors in the design of a digital hardware synth and the software running on its DSPs or whatever just the same as the cheap little tricks in an analog circuit.

[sin night]

You may want to give a look at my signature and the threads I started in the "Samplers, Sampling & Sample Libraries" section for more details.

Most of the time, I record samples from analog synths to use them as a "rich" source to build patches in a sampler, using the filtering capabilities of the sampler rather than then relying on the original synth features, so I think some of those samples may be useful to you.

A good part of the samples I share are raw waveforms (clean or distorted - I usually state when it's processed/distorted) without filtering. I usually record every note for a few seconds, so my sample packs are big (in relation to the actual amount of samples / content).

I usually don't state the synth / equipment (but I provide them if asked via PM, but these days I'm quite busy so I don't have time to provide all the informations).

My samples are free for music making, but not to build new libraries / products and then share them (I usually state that in the readme inside the packs). Of course loading them in a sampler / synth and using them to make your own music is absolutely ok (that's what those samples are mean for).

[Synthack]

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[aciddose]

He's one of those uber-geniuses.

This is interpretive bias. I view myself as far below what should be considered acceptable as a valid lifeform deserving of respect or the right to life. If you want to subjectively interpret what I say or do outside your own bubble, please take this into account.

I'm attempting to do myself a favor here. If you were me decades ago and I was sending this post as a message to myself in the past, I would say: Please stop wasting your time.

I also argued with and misinterpreted the advice I received. If you were me decades ago I'd hope maybe you'd hold a mirror in my face as I gave you advice.

[Synthack]

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