[sdiy] Wavetable info

[Richard Wentk]

At 15:49 01/01/2004 -0800, Tom Arnold wrote:
>On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 12:50:55PM -0700, Scott Gravenhorst wrote:
> > Hi all, and Happy New Year.
> >
> > I've often thought that it would be interesting to do waveform drawing,
> > but I've also wondered just how useful it is?
>
>For me its more an exercise rather then anything I have a goal with.
>I have some ideas for morphing from waveform to waveform over time and the
>like but at the moment this is more a Blinkenlights kinda project.
>
>It cant be that usefull or perhaps more synths would have been made to use it.
>Lets see, there was the Waveterm, a couple Roland units, cant forget the DSS1
>( although I try to, but that huge mass is still in the garage ), and theres
>that beastie that keeps showing up on ebay.
>
>I'm interested in the actual interface more then anything else.  The same
>code that can draw waveforms can draw envelopes for example....

The Waldorf Wave and Microwave include waveform drawing as an option. I 
have a Microwave and eMagic's SoundDiver editor, which includes both 
waveform drawing, drawbar-like overtone mixing for single-cycle waves and 
also overtone envelopes. You can load these into the uWave in the user wave 
section. You can also create wavetable morphs, although these morph the 
waveshape and not the harmonic content.

Waveform drawing on its own doesn't make for very interesting sounds. 
Morphing can make for interesting sounds but it's not quite as cool as you 
might think.

By far the most interesting results I ever got was from an additive patch I 
put together in Reaktor with 8 banks of four sine oscillators, each bank 
with its own envelope. The Synclavier used to be able to make sounds in a 
similar way, as did the DKI Synergy and the Kawai K5. You can create some 
fantastic sounds like this, but it's not really something you'd want to do 
in hardware without building a monster custom digital osc bank.

In Reaktor you can of course play these sounds polyphonically, but they're 
often too big to work well like that.

Richard