What Can We Learn from the Basic Synthesis Waveforms?

[@kcrosley]

For a sort of "sequel" to this video, see: kzbin.info/www/bejne/aInMYn-GiJZoqdE

[@CapriciousBlackBox]

9:15 “…..and in fact I did that…” 😅 how did I know that was coming? 😂 Very interesting stuff Keith, I’m going to school! Cheers

[@CHEpachilo]

When you said about 1/n^2 falloff I was so excited. Finally somebody else found secret waveform that is missing from basically all synths. The one that have triangle harmonic falloff, but spectre of a saw. The one that is easy to build in analog and I have no idea why it is not a staple waveform for any oscillator. But you go a little bit different direction and found its phase-shifted version. Well, I guess the day of rectified sine is not coming today. 😁

[@kcrosley]

@@CHEpachilo thanks for watching and glad you found that interesting!

[@intevolver]

triangle waves are great for sub basses, I prefer distorting a triangle to low-passing a square.

[@kcrosley]

@intevolver, thanks for watching! Very good point and a good synth tip to remember.

[@InsidesAndOutsides]

I think maybe a good name for that "other" triangle wave might be "interleaved triangle"? Because every alternate harmonic has been inverted, kind of like clasped hands.

[@kcrosley]

@InsidesAndoutsides, thanks for watching! Not a terrible idea, but do note that it’s the triangle wave where every other odd harmonic undergoes 180 degree phase rotation. In the “first” version all odd harmonics have the same phase (0). BTW, I’ve seen a few analog/Eurorack oscillators where the Sine wave looks a bit more like that guy than a true sine wave. 🤷‍♂️

[@InsidesAndOutsides]

@@kcrosley Yes, I realise that. I just thought that you'd need to rotate the rotated harmonics back again in order to get them all to zero :) Maybe it's not the best analogy!

[@InsidesAndOutsides]

This is kind of tangential, but related... I had an epiphany when watching Alex Ball talking about the Roland SH-7, which has an unusual feature: a number of square waves at different octaves that can be mixed via faders. I suddenly realised that the mathematics of the harmonics in that situation mean that there are no frequencies in common between any of the faders because an odd number times 2^n must always be different from any given odd number times 2^m, where n != m (because of prime factorisation). Clever, really, though it's not clear whether it helps the sound to be more musical... perhaps it might.

[@kcrosley]

Yeah, a weird alternative to “additive” synthesis with sine waves, for sure. Interesting, I’ll have to go watch that. For a really crazy exploration of different waveforms that are analogs of the square wave, see this well-illustrated gem!: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fJfOkmCehd-onZIsi=sfvgCYMy-FQdsw9f

[@InsidesAndOutsides]

@@kcrosley Ah, I don't think I've seen that one before. Thanks! It's interesting that although we hear according to the spectrum, nonlinear processors like distortion effects can have very different impacts on waves depending on the phases. Someone in the comments of that video was talking about using the alternative version of a triangle wave in order to avoid over-compression of bass sounds, which sounds like a topic that could get very interesting and complex. The sort of thing Dan Worrall would love to discuss, I expect :)

[@anbanb8787]

great sounds. strangely though wavetables in the last collection seem to have the same name when loaded to modwave. is there a way to prepend a unique index to each for easier management

[@kcrosley]

@@anbanb8787 the issue is that the names are quite long. The unique index is at a position off of the modwave screen. In modwave native you can see the full names in the Play tab. I have no idea why in the Librarian screen we can’t make the name column *just* a bit wider!

[@anbanb8787]

@@kcrosley thank you for confirmation. i was hoping it could be easy to prepend an index to the start

[@kcrosley]

Hey @anbanb8787, I understand the frustration. For my own work on these, long-ass filenames really help me understand where/how a given wavetable was constructed, and I'm often revisiting previous creations. But I know this is suboptimal for the distributed versions. Going forward, I'm going to try and limit filenames/wavetable names to 24 characters for display compatibility in modwave (especially the hardware version).