Sweeping wavetables using .WAVs

Previously I've blogged about 'Waivy', the simple swept wavetable glimpse into the forthcoming update to Waverne. 

Well, as I was playing with Waivy, it struck me that instead of fixing the wavetable with the carefully compiled fixed version that I'd included, it might be interesting to allow .WAVs to be used instead, and so 'Sweeper' was born. 

Simple and fun (and with free 'Frasier' references), Sweeper is a variation of my recent 'Waivy' plug-in, but adapted for use by those people who like to use their own .wavs instead of pre-compiled wavetables. 

Sweeper allows you to use the default wavetable (different to the one in Waivy, of course) or drop your own .WAVs onto the waveform display and then select the part of the waveform that looks interesting (and sounds interesting). The separate 'Wave' control allows finer selection, and the 'Sweep' control allows dynamic wavetable sweeps in real-time, as per various synthesizers of the past. 

Please note that M4L and Live are a little bit selective in their import of AIFFs, and so only .wavs can be used in this plug-in. (Sound of people converting AIFFs into WAVs...)

Also note that the obvious use: extracting waves from loops, turns out to be somewhat less than anywhere near as brilliant as I had hoped, so don't be disappointed. (Sound of people not converting AIIFs into WAVs...)

Because Sweeper is deliberately simple, the envelope is an 'AD' 'contour-like' shape, which isn't as limiting as you might expect, and remember that this is a preview! Also there isn't any filtering, which can make Sweeper a little brittle in sound, but this is easily overcome by adding a filter, and Ableton Live makes this very easy:

The 'Auto Filter' remains one of my favourite effects in Live, and in this case, it allows you to do more than just remove some of the harsh top-end, it also allows you to dynamically filter the output of Sweeper using the LFO. Adding all of this functionality into Sweeper would have made it much more complex, and when you can add 'Auto Filter'....

As always with early versions of my M4L devices, you may need to do some tweaking of settings to get the best results. In particular, the 'Wave' and 'Start' controls tend to interact and you may need to adjust them to get the wavetable sound you want, instead of a metallic buzzing. Alternatively, if you want nasty metallic buzzing, then Sweeper does it by accident too!

Anyways, as a free 'explore me!' plug-in, Sweeper has lots of scope for making some very nice sounds, plus some dreadful aliased sounds as well -  and which is which all depends on your taste...

Sweeper is available for download from MaxForLive.com.

Waverne development = Waivy

For a while, I've been working on a new version of my Waverne synthesiser. Waverne takes the Laverne synthesiser example from Max (by Cycling'74) and replaces the waveform-based synth engine with a swept segment wavetable that provides very complex sounds instead of static ones. Kind of 'effects within' rather than 'at the end of the' audio processing... If you've ever used the Tide synthesiser from Christian Kleine, then that is Waverne expanded in several directions! But what about making Waverne simpler and smaller?

Waivy is a teeny, tiny version of part of the forthcoming new version of Waverne. I now have a more powerful wavetable tool to work with (Wave Creator) and this simplifies the job of creating the large wavetables that the engine requires. For Waverne I used Audacity a lot to generate the custom wavetables, but for Waivy I have used the Wave Creator 512 tool, and the results are very encouraging.

Waivy has a minimalistic set of controls. But don't let this fool you: Waivy is a powerful little plug-in, with lots of sound generating capability.

[Detune] allows you to tune the two oscillators to 'in-tune' by clicking on the triangle (or setting it to 0.00. Moving th control away from 0.00 detunes the two oscillators symmetrically, so there isn't any overall pitch change, but it does mean that the direction you move in does not matter - the tune sounds the same if you move the control to the left or the right. I considered putting the detune so that 0.00 was on the left hand end, and full detune was on the right, with clockwise rotation giving more detune, but this felt all wrong - 'in tune' had to be in the centre of the control, so that's where it is.

[Timbre] allows you to select the part of the wavetable that you want to use as the basic sound. You have complete freedom of where you choose within the range. There are 28 basic waveforms, plus ll the overlaps, so there are a lot of different starting points to explore.

[Sweep] allows you to control the amount of movement through the wavetable that the envelope causes. At the 0.00 position (left-most rotation), you get the basic wavetable itself: static and boring), but rotating it to the right causes more and more envelope modulation of the wavetable sweeping, and this gives a nicely animated feel to the sounds. There is a bit of interaction between the Timbre and Sweep controls at the extremes of the ranges (I'm still learning about the wonderfully-named 'pong~' function in Max) and so you may need to do some tweaking to get solid sounds.

[Attack] and [Decay] are a very simple 'contour'-type AD envelope, where there is no sustain, and once triggered, the envelope does its thing with no re-triggering or release complications. Just about as basic as envelopes get, but because the wavetable sweeping is intimately linked to the envelope, the Attack and Decay controls are very much part of the timbral control set, so don't just think they are controlling the amplitude.

[Polyphony] is the final control, and this gives away the roots of this instrument: the ever-popular Pluggo 'Big Ben', possibly one of the most edited M4L examples ever created, and the core of many M4L giveaways from lots of online sources, including, now, me! (It will be interesting to see if any 're-skinned' variants of Waivy turn up in the next few months...) Click on the number and move it up or down to set the polyphony limit, after which note stealing will occur. 8 is okay for most purposes, but long decays might need more to avoid sudden loss of audible notes.

And that's it. Simple but rather effective for some sounds, and it seems to be reasonably light on CPU resource, which is useful in some circumstances! Enjoy.

Waivy is available from MaxForLive.com.

Here is an early version of Waivy in a typical chain: Waivy first, then echo, then reverb...

Wavetables as sound effect sources

I've always been a fan of wavetables. The direct relationship between a block of memory holding waveform information and the resulting sound is useful in lots of ways, particularly if you go beyond the basic 'linear read'.

Previously, I've released some of my early experimentation in M4L with wavetables, and the latest revision is now available: Wavetable Sound Effects 0v04. (from Maxforlive.com) Compared to the previous versions, there are more wavetables, more control over the scanning through the table, and a better user interface that makes it very clear where the LFOs are and what they do. Each wavetable is just 2 seconds in length, but the sound making possibilities are much wider than this might suggest.

As usual with most devices, start off by turning the LFO modulation levels down to zero. In this case there are three: Vibrato for frequency modulation, Rangato (range-ato) for the modulation of the range of table scanning, and Timbrato (timbre-ato) for the modulation of the centre of the table scan. Once you are familiar with the basic operation, then you can return to the LFO modulation and explore how it affects the sound.

Basic operation centres around the main controls, which are in the dark backgrounded area. The Table selection chooses between ten very different sets of audio files (hand-crafted from scratch in Audacity). The Start and Finish controls adjust the region of the wavetable that will be scanned and turned into audio, and the triangle sets the centre of the region - if the white area is outside of the window, then nothing happens (the limits are hard-coded), so there's no need to explore what happens if you do this.

The Freq (uency) control sets the rate at which the region is scanned and thus turned into audio, and the High/Low button on the right controls how quickly this happens. underneath the Freq control is the Shift control, which enables the output pitch to be changed independently of the scanning rate. The sound sometimes vanishes if you set the Shift control too high, so explore the left hand side of the dial first...

The Range control provides more scanning control, and the indicator bar next to it shows the total modulation being applied to the scanner.

That's about it really. Explore and enjoy!

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Wavetable Sound Effects 0v03 - Update!

After getting my head around some of the features of Max again (like having to make sure that you use 2000. to indicate a float instead of 2000 which is an integer), I've now updated my Wavetable Sound Effects Max For Live (M4L) instrument to version 0v03. The intermediate 0v02 version was superceded during testing of a different wavetable device that I'm still working on...

This new version has much the same principles behind it, but now allows finer control, and has better LFOs. The new LFOs include a 'Shape' control that samples the waveform and gives a kind of Sample/Hold effect, plus there's now a frequency modulating LFO for each LFO, which extends their usability quite a lot. I also added three new wavetables, so there's lots more sound generating capability. This device is intended to be explored, much as one would do with the analogue synths of old like the EMS VCS3... So feel free to explore.

You can find it on the Max For Live dot Com library site here.

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Waveform explorations...

Waveforms are often used as visual metaphors for sound. In actuality, the shape of the waveform is a poor representation because you can only see the top 30 dB of the harmonic content - the rest is hidden in the thickness of the line that is used to draw the waveform and other difficulties of trying to represent a large dynamic range in a medium that has only a tiny dynamic range (a waveform diagram). But the metaphor is useful, and as long as the sound is the important thing, then crude waveform diagrams are acceptable as symbols.

Image via Wikipedia

Possibly the most interesting use of sounds that were presented as waveforms was in the early 1980s, when German synthesizer pioneer Wolfgang Palm and his company, PPG (Palm Products GmbH) produced a series of leading-edge 'wavetable' synthesizers that used digital techniques at a time when analogue was king and Yamaha's DX series of FM synthesizers were being developed in Japan. Digital synthesis in a popular and affordable form is often credited as appearing with the DX7, but PPG's 'Wave' series of wavetable synthesizers used (for the time) sophisticated digital sound generation with analogue filtering and enveloping. By changing rapidly from one waveform to another - called sweeping' through a table of waveforms (a wavetable) - the sound generation produced much more complex and evolving sounds than more conventional synthesizers of the time with sine, square, sawtooth and triangle waveforms. I was hooked, and I've been a champion of wavetables ever since, although I also have weaknesses for FM and additive synthesis too, and I'm very confortable with subtractive synthesis.

So when I heard that a new Live Pack was available for Ableton Live, that provided lots of waveform samples and used Live's Instrument Racks and Simpler sample replay engine to produce wavetable-like sounds, then I downloaded the demo, auditioned the sounds, and liked what I heard. Very soon afterwards, I bought the complete set: Waveforming, from MESA+ (and not to be confused with the Dutch Nanotechnology research institute).

Waveforming provides 66 multi-sampled wave-samples, 270 Instrument Racks (plus Simpler Presets) as well as a few drum kits, sound effects, and sample songs (provided as Live Sets, so you caan delve into them and see exactly how the sounds are used in context!).


The sounds cover a wide range, and fall into very few of the classic wavetable cliche traps. I was very impressed with the breadth of sounds, and their usability - I was able to find timbres to fill all the niches I wanted, and overall the sounds seemed fresh and very usable (as well as offering lots of customisation options through macro controls, and lots of room for making new sounds by using the supplied samples). Of course, sound is very much a personal thing, and so these are my own subjective opinions, but I think I'm going to use the Waveforming sounds a lot!

Thoroughly recommended - try out the demo and see if your ears like it too!

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