Creating Single-Cycle Waveforms from Samples

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#1

apologies if this has been covered. i looked but did not find the answer to my question elsewhere

are there any sort of rules or guidelines from making your own single cycle waveforms from sampled material?

i have all of these really cool electromagnetic samples from an awesome Tidbit Audio Stereo EMF Microphone I got recently and most of the samples from my zoom h5 using that mic sound like oscillators waves. so im trying to loop small sections as large as possible while narrowing in on the section until it reaches a stable pitch. i want to retain the texture of the sample, but most of the time, i feel that i get the loop so small that it could be any sound, and its just a sine wave oscillating at a “c note” frequency

i cant tell if thats normal, or the best one could hope for, single cycle waves are literally just one very small single section of a waveform. i just cant help but feeling that it might be redundant or useless. since I cant tell, i am just curious if there is a standard i could use on the digitakt (without using audacity or something like that) to where i know i am retaining the wave’s unique shape and timbre, while achieving a stable chromatic frequency cycle. or am i overthinking it? or is it not very likely to be as scientific as this process requires without using a computer program to dissect an exact single cycle

maybe just best practices, tips, what others do. i kind of like just winging it, experimenting and seeing what sounds good. but after trying this like 30 times, i find myself hoping that im not just creating the exact same cycle over and over again on the most micro-cycle level possible

does that make sense at all?

#2

Seems normal if a short sample selection sounds like a regular osc.

Try Slice machine and modulate Slices, kind of wavetable stuff.

Unfortunately an ZERO CROSSING Slice grid is applied automatically and it ruins tuning. :angry:
I don’t have this problem with Octatrack and I don’t use Digitakt anymore, waiting for updates !

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#3

I suspect this is the problem. If your source is at all complex (overtones at not quite the exact multiples, subharmonics, irregular features like noise, or movement in the base frequency) all the subtleties will be lost.

I found SCWFs quite disappointing when I started using them, so I think I understand what you mean.

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#4

Maybe that is the problem. :wink:
Another one is values. Start End values / time depends on sample length.

It would be better with sample values like on Octatrack, in order to select directly the pitch you want.

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#5

You just reminded me of loopops hack to get pulse width modulation on a SCWF (also works on M:S)

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#6

Adventure Kid’s collection of SCW’s is great, and they work well with the DigiChain sample chainer, as here:

As for making field recordings into interesting SCWs, I don’t that’s easy to do even on a computer. The site above has a link to a browser that shows what the SCWs look like and gives some hints of what kinds of sounds make good ones.

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#7

good point. i do have adventurekids, got them back when i first got my octatrack. its one of the only sample libraries i put into the octa that werent my own because i thought it would allow more sound design flexibility. which i guess it does, but as @bibenu says, the results are just not very exciting to me

i guess my bigger problem is with sampling in general. my entire sound design process is really focused on pulling the most unique/best sound i can get by taking a limited set of tools and doing things ive never heard before from them. so synthesis is more my speed, i think

i just have no interest in using digitakt as a traditional drum machine, or even loading drum samples into it, or ‘crate digging’ or using other peoples samples at all. so i was kind of trying to explore what could be done with my own recorded content aside from just pitching it down, filtering and adding some reverb and distortion. unfortunately, even with the nice elektron envelopes, for some reason, its not very satisfying to really carve out existing sampled textures much more than what’s possible with an electribe es-1’s truncate function because its like a subtractive process without any of the initial creation build-up stages. just taking the good parts out.

im likely being pessimistic, or just in a creative rut at the moment, but i am feeling uninspired by the sampling process.

these are all great answers though. i did suspect this was the case, that its just not very likely to be able to retain the timbre of a sample while reducing it to a single cycle. or even really craft a new interesting texture from an existing sample’s single cycle.

i think i will try @sezare56’s suggestion of a more wavetable-like process. this seems to be the way.

thank you for the suggestions, everyone

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#8

I’m sure you’ve tried but just in case, Lfos to sample start, end etc can yield interesting results

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#9

Layering and internal resampling with FX applied make interesting result as well.

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#10

It’s worth trying the loopop hack above before giving up on single cycles. It’s framed as “pulse width modulation” but actually it can be applied to add movement to any waveform.

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#11

i do this a lot, i love making kind of erratic loops by modulating the loop point as well.

@bibenu i will try that for sure, thanks

heh, look at that. maybe this is the way to go after all. not used to polyphonic samplers but always wanted one.

he mentions polyphonic fx processed sounds as well here:

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