MPE Sound Design in Surge XT: Wavetables

[@mwk1979]

I thought I would start out easy and record a physically modeled guitar sound. But it's not working. It looks clipped in Vital and I don't have the normalize button like you do in the video. I tried to normalize it to a smaller amplitude in Audacity, but Vital just renormalizes it. It looks clipped in Surge, but so does your duduk as shown in the video. But your duduk that comes with Surge doesn't look clipped. Anyway it sounds like a horn in Surge and to be honest I don't hear much of a Morph when I modulate with timbre (also tried pressure)

[@thoughtFormMax]

The duduk that comes with Surge was made with Serum, which for reasons I don't understand doesn't have the same "looks like clipping" problem as Vital. The important thing though is if it sounds clipped. It would be buzzier, which might be masked if your guitar sound is buzzy to begin with. As for the morph, it might be you don't have enough contrast between your start and end waves. Can you see a difference in the waveforms in Surge's oscillator display? If you open the exported wavetable in audacity, can you see a difference between the start and end waves? If these look the same, I would suspect a mistake in Vital. Make sure you have your start keyframe selected and then enter 0 as the position, then make sure you have the last keyframe selected (the diamond will turn purple) and enter 2048 (or whatever number is appropriate) for the position. Then try the export again. I'm sorry if I didn't explain things well enough in the video. Let me know how it goes.

[@thoughtFormMax]

It's odd that you don't have the Normalize button in Vital. There is a second Normalize button, at the right in the same bar where you set the position and window size. Do you have that one? It doesn't look to me like it's doing anything but maybe it applies normalization on export...that might be the answer now that I look at it. I turned it off (grey not purple) and now my same duduk shows up in Surge looking right.

[@mwk1979]

@@thoughtFormMax I do have the second Normalize button and turning on/off doesn't change things

[@mwk1979]

@@thoughtFormMax I tried two waves with more contrast. I think I hear a morph, but I feel like it is wishful thinking

[@harryleblanc4939]

Very illuminating. I always learn so much from your tutorials. Keep 'em coming!

[@MrDeadend1973]

Incredible video! Gonna get so much more use out of them now!

[@thoughtFormMax]

Thank you, I hope so!

[@mwk1979]

Using Audacity, I checked the number of samples in the wavetable produced by Vital. It's 262,144 samples in the entire wavetable. If I right click on the wavetable plot in Surge XT, it says 256 frames by 2048 samples or 524,288 samples which is twice the number of samples according to Audacity. I'm thinking Surge doesn't read the Vital wavetable correctly 😞

[@mwk1979]

The creative juices are flowing! Any frequencies best for waves in a wavetable or just pick the frequency that best represents the timbre of the sound you want?

[@mwk1979]

OK. I listened to the video a second time and you said F#0 is the ideal frequency

[@mwk1979]

The Surge 2d wavetable plot I get is about 2.5 cycles. This is different than all the other wavetables that show just one cycle. According to the Surge manual: "Surge XT can also import wavetables containing a clm block to indicate loop size (as used by Serum), a cue block (as used by various products including Native Instruments) and a smpl block. Wavetable files without loop information are loaded as one-shots." I'm wondering if I'm just getting a one shot because Vital doesn't add a clm block or a cue block or a smpl block ...

[@thoughtFormMax]

Surge always shows me 2.5 cycles in the 2D view, I don't think that's a problem. Vital should be adding all the info you need; it works every time for me. I have had trouble in the past with waves being loaded as 1-shots, though. I'd like to help you get this figured out but I don't know if we can do it without visual aids. If you like, feel free to drop me a message using the contact form at thoughtformmusic.com, and we can trade screenshots or whatever we need to do to make this work.

[@mwk1979]

Is the built in microphone of an iPhone good enough to record sounds for a wavetable?

[@thoughtFormMax]

Yes. That's one of the coolest things about this technique. Any noise, degradation, mpeg artifacts, etc. will all be transformed into pristine harmonic sine waves. So you might end up with some unexpected harmonics (which can be filtered or EQ'd if you don't like them) but the wave will be entirely usable.

[@thoughtFormMax]

Even using the lousiest recording, the problem will be with fidelity, not quality, if that makes sense. iPhone will do a lot better than that.

[@jasonmosler]

man i don't know if its he vibe your going for or not, but you give off the impression as if you have a sound proofed room with a couple of chained up women in it.

[@thoughtFormMax]

haha probably not. i'm new to the having my face on camera thing...hopefully it will improve in the future