[EDIT: See below for improved recipe] I figured out a quick-and-dirty way to make custom .wav files that can be loaded into Digitakt II’s Grid machine and used as wavetable synths. If anyone has an easier or more precise way to do this, please feel free to make suggestions.
In Ableton Live, open a midi track and add Live’s Wavetable midi instrument.
Choose the Wavetable settings you want, create an automation lane for the wavetable position parameter.
Set the bpm to 967.50 [This is the closest bpm I was able to calculate to have a C2 note’s hz # (64.5 hz, or cycles per second) end up being a multiple of 64 (for the Digitakt’s Grid machine Slice param to modulate) wave cycles in a small number of bars. In this case there are 130 wave cycles in 2 bars, so if you crop off the last 2 cycles, you have 2 cycles per DT Slice. I tried to have 1 sinlge cycle per slice, but it seems to be too small a sample to use in a Grid machine (or else I made a mistake somewhere - I’m just winging this…) ]
create a 2-bar clip
draw a C2 note in the piano roll for whole duration of the clip and then automate the wavetable position parameter to change linearly across the note from 0% at the start to 100% at the end.
record-arm the track. have a listen to the clip to make sure it’s ok
You can save this project as a template for making more wavetables
export clip to audio as a 32-bit .wav file AS A LOOP (this last detail means Live will crop off excess time from the (beginning and?) end and make it easier to crop later.
open the audio clip, zoom in as much as you can and crop off the last 2 wave cycles. I had better luck doing this step in Audacity, but you could probably do it in Live too.
Hope this helps people make some interesting wavetable packs to use on the DTII
This isn’t perfect. There’s some slight clickiness I’m getting sometimes. Best results so far though. I’ll update if I can find a better way to do this.
Thanks a lot. This can be very useful. Still it is not easy and unconvinient to chop the sample at the end. The recipe is not quite ther yet… Would it be possible to set the initial clip length to match?
It might. I should do the math over to see if I missed anything. I think the challenge is that Ableton Live can only do 1 or 2 decimal points for bpm and it might require a lot more precision than that.
Another challenge is that when you’re dealing with very complex folded waveforms, it’s not always easy it to see where the exact zero point of the wave cycle is. It would be better to somehow auto-crop it with precision and remove the human hand-eye element
So I have an improved recipe. I made a mistake the first try. C2 is 65.4 hz not 64.5, so the new, simpler recipe is
1 In Live, open a midi track and add Live’s Wavetable midi instrument.
Choose the Wavetable settings you want, create an automation lane for the wavetable position parameter.
2 Set the bpm to 981
3 create a 4-bar clip
4 draw a C2 note in the piano roll for whole duration of the clip and then automate the wavetable position parameter to change linearly across the note from 0% at the start to 100% at the end.
5 export clip to audio as a 32-bit .wav file AS A LOOP (this last detail means Live will crop off excess time from the (beginning and?) end.
Works perfectly now! Except slice positions 1 and 64 get a bit weird, but as long as you stay within 2-63 you have a fully functional wavetable. You can crank tons of these out very easily once the initial template is set up. Enjoy!!
I saw somewhere confirmed that DT2 doesn’t force zero crossings on slice machine, which makes it work differently for wavetables and for chains of single-cycle waveforms.
That’s interesting, thanks. Makes me want to experiment with importing some drones into the DT1 and using the slice machine with forward and backwards loops to see if that actually solved my issues with trying to get drones from external files to not click.
This is awesome and inspired me to try some things.
I found an alternative method of the OP by creating 64 frame wavetables in serum.
1: Using Serums oscillator editor, create any 64 frame wavetable or reduce a pre existing one to 64 frames.
2: Export them to Ableton. Using re-pitch warp mode stretch the wavetable to 2 bars using 981 bpm.
3: Right Click > Consolidate > Right Click file > Show File In Browser > Rename file > Save Project > Ctrl Drag file to desktop/folder > Add to Digitakt 2.
You can also get these files from your project folder after consolidation.
Alternatively you can create automation within serum. In the file menu select resample to oscillator. This creates a wavetable with your automation sort of “baked in”