Wavetable synthesis - how best to wet appetite and then grok it

joegrant413

So I've had Nave on iOS a long time. And now I have Phase Plant VST. Also Pigments demo. And I see the raves for Groove Synthesis 3rd Wave hardware synth for $5000.

I also get the shiny object interest in wave table. But unlike subtractive synthesis, I haven't been able to get a grasp on it, either with my hands or my head and ears.

How might I understand this and have fun with it at the same time? I'm open to use either stuff on iOS, or my Phase Plant VST. Not open to dropping $5k for 3rd Wave to learn, though!

Thanks,
Joe

tyslothrop1

I really like vital VST, which has a free version that's not limited featurewise (more presets and wavetables in the paid ones, but you can import your own in the free version). There is this cool video with fifty tricks you can do with it, I find rather impressive:

espiegel123

Wavetables aren’t distinct from subtractive synthesis. Think of wavetables as another type of oscillator that can cycle through different waveforms (in fact, many virtual analog synths use wavetable) rather than endlessly repeating the same cycle.

Samu

I like Drambo's WaveTable oscillator and especially the 'Wave Effects' that are used to mangle and modify the tables with the CPU being the only limit as to how many wave-effects can be stacked on top of each other, there are so many effects available so the actual 'Wave Table' doesn't really matter so much as it can be morphed and mangled to just about anything

akeia

I think a good way to understand WT synthesis is analyzing the Nave patches. You say that you have the synth already and the patches are good examples for what WT can do. Also every video about Serum patch building will deepen WT understanding. That is the most used synth in the category and there are a lot of videos and other materials. Most modern Wavetable synths can emulate Serum functionality.

joegrant413

Thanks folks. Would you consider custom wave tables an advanced topic for later?

tyslothrop1

@joegrant413 said:
Thanks folks. Would you consider custom wave tables an advanced topic for later?

Some experimenting won't hurt. If you don't have any fun doing it, come back to it later (or not).

Here is free desktop wavetableeditor I like:

https://synthtech.com/waveedit/

Here is a paid one, that's well documented on YouTube:

https://www.sonicacademy.com/products/node

joegrant413

Awesome. Gracias!

Poppadocrock

@espiegel123 said:
Wavetables aren’t distinct from subtractive synthesis. Think of wavetables as another type of oscillator that can cycle through different waveforms (in fact, many virtual analog synths use wavetable) rather than endlessly repeating the same cycle.

That parentheses is an interesting insight.

catherder

ButterSynth does wavetable synthesis and has a built in wavetable editor. You can import and export wavetables or standard audio files. I find the editing tools pretty good for learning.

u0421793

Wavetables were originally a nifty idea to move filtering into the digital world, at a time that digital filters themselves just weren’t good enough

A digital oscillator was possible without too much of a problem, first as digitally-controlled oscillators (where digital control told an analogue oscillator what frequency to run at) and then, the idea of the entire waveform of the oscillator being encoded as a digital table of values to be read out over and over at whatever frequency you demand, gave us the fully digital oscillator. If you're encoding a table of sine values, or square values (easy), or sawtooth or ramp or triangle, etc, you might as well go crazy and do some extra waveforms while you’re at it, so they did

Now you have a good-enough digital implementation of an oscillator, more flexible than a real analogue one, but the filtering at that stage was not possible to do digitally without people spotting that it was crap – however, what if you expanded the table of values idea of the oscillator waveforms, so that you had an extra dimension – three dimensions of data – tables OF tables of values, yes, tables of different waveforms, which you could also traverse

The table of wave values was running at audio rate, the table of table of wave values was able to be indexed into at a slower rate (because that’s how you’d want to use it) and this indexing-in of the third dimension of wavetableness allowed ’modulation’ types of effects, providing you filled the many tables of wave values with wave shapes that looked like they would be if you’d put them through a filter and, on each successive table of wave values, moved the filter cutoff freq and/or resonance

Hence if you run the table of wave values on the first indexed table, you might get the filter wide open, the second indexed table it’d be like the filter imperceptibly slightly closed a bit from wide open, the third indexed table the filter slightly closed a bit more, and so on until the final indexed table it was closed all the way – that way you’d get the effect of having a filter that you can sweep through or wobble through (by changing the index of the table of which table of wave values you’re reading out over and over) and it was magic – well, cheap!

Polyphonic digital with (simulated) filtering was possible, without it necessarily having to be paraphonic

Of course, if you’re going to carefully simulate within a table of tables of wave values, a sawtooth being successively filtered down, table by table, or in another wavetable, a square, filtered down, etc, or a pulse, filter, etc, or a weird hybrid waveform, filtered, etc, you could in theory also do pulse position modulation (not really, but simulated across several successive wave value tables within a wavetable), or pulse width modulation, or even a bit of each and have it push into a resonant peak at one end of the table while it pulse narrows, or something

Or, there could be wavetables with hitherto impossible wave evolutions – and that’s pretty much where wavetables took off

joegrant413

Well, this appears to be the most well-considered reply to any question I’ve asked on Audiobus. Tbh, I don’t understand all of it. Yet.

Let me ask this…. Are you saying that a wave table could serve as a representation of almost any timbre?

rs2000

@joegrant413 said:
Thanks folks. Would you consider custom wave tables an advanced topic for later?

Yes.
Making wavetables from samples of acoustic instruments is rewarding but also challenging.