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Old 13.08.2015, 04:33 AM
mrdos mrdos is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TweakHead View Post
Wavetables are NOT just a cheap replacement for samples. It's way beyond that. And it's much more about your ability to quickly change the timbre, either gently or aggressively or in steps even - that's the whole point of it.

Sampling is a whole other deal. Even though this wavetables can be made of small samples. The ones in Massive, for example, are made out of 4080 samples each - which is a bit to short for most other sampling stuff, right?

With wavetables you can change the timbre just by scanning the wavetable position, changing the harmonic content of your sound, while maintaining it's pitch.

Both Serum and the Virus are great synths on their own right. It sounds great to my ears, not weak at all + even like it's oscillators quite a lot!!

Cheers
I didn't mean to say they are like cheap replacement samples now. I was saying, when wavetables were conceived, originally, back in the day, from what I understand (I believe Waldorf's predecessor, PPG, originated this in 1980), it was at that time a substitute for samples, because digital memory was way too expensive and slow. Remember what computers were like in the early 80s. 64K (kilobytes!) of RAM was a lot of memory and was expensive, and slow, so that wasn't enough to hold any audio, much less high fidelity sound.

And think about how they can still be used that way; you can make totally convincing pianos and stringed instruments and stuff with the right wavetables; so I think the wavetables back then were less about crazy digital sounds and more about emulating basic instruments.

But now, clearly, it has evolved into something else, and synths like Serum and the Virus have unique wavetables suited to a certain kind of music, and have a lot of granularity when it comes to movement in the indexes, etc. It's a great type of synthesis and my personal favorite; I use it to great effect on basically everything.

The only thing I have found that I think is better is modular, and that, so far, is really fun but really hard
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