Please can I have advice about single cycle waveforms. I’d like to try using some to create synth patches.
I have read that many of them aren’t very good.
Is there a good resource for single cycles waves that are good?
I don’t need many, just some good quality ones that I can use as synth oscillators.
I have seen some that come with sysex files to load in. Is this the best way to go? Or are simple cycles waves without sysex just as good? How do you even use the sysex files?
Also, setting the factory wavetables in Grid machine, using an LFO to sweep through the slots, that’s to me sounding a lot better than the Adventure Kid Wave Tables (a free collection of 2000+ SCws) I’d gathered into chains for DT1.
Use your ears to decide whether something sounds good - single cycle waveforms are a difficult thing to make sound bad to be honest. They’re just single cycles of a waveform.
The thing with using single cycle waveforms in hardware samplers such as the DT 2 or the Polyend Tracker, they usually only have a single sample/sound slot per track, so sometimes the sound can sound thin, if they added a second sample slot per track where you could mix 2 different waveforms or samples, you would be able to create much more interesting sounds much like a 2 oscillator synthesiser.
Yeah. You do this but one single cycle on one slot and a second on a second slot then sample that result and now you have that sound on one sound slot which sounds like a dual oscillator synth. Repeat for how many oscillators you want.
You can make your own single cycles in Renoise / Reduxs sampler. You can literally draw a wave shape and even do it in stereo. Apparently you can do this in audacity as well. Then just export to the digitakt. But really Adventure Kids single cycle waveforms should cover everything.
It would be cool to get freaky with parameter locking on both sample slots though, but then I suppose you could again do this on 2 tracks and then just resample the pattern loop, there’s usually always a work around
Yeah, maybe they could make a dual slot machine? Maybe it could replace the second band pass filter. It would definitely be better to have two oscillators going at once.
It’d also be nice to have the oscillators free running instead of always starting from the beginning. You can modulate start point or loop point but it’s not really the same thing. The one sampler I have that actually does this is Assimil8or but I basically just use that for oscillator sounds. It’d be nice if digitakt could do that though.
They are fine, but as mentioned… SC tend to sound thin prepared to detuned multiOSC.
Just follow the tip/workflows above and you have a weapon at hand.
Also: Throw some LFO in the audible spectrum in there to fatten up.
I use Hardcore and Softcore to generate single cycle waves. Those are 2 free software developed by Ess to create single cycle waves.
On DTII, I find the use of SCW very powerful. Don’t forget that BRR, Distorsion and SRR are applied just after the sample reading. So it means these effects will directly alter and shape the waveform. With LFOs (used as LFOs or enveloppes) on those parameters, it’s possible to create complex sonic behaviors.
A technique that I also use a lot is to generate a very complex waveform with Hardcore and to set length to 60 or 30 so this way, your wave is still in tune (but 1 or 2 octave higher) but it allows to do pseudo wavetable or pseudo PWM by modulating the start of the sample.
It’s also possible to mimic a dual oscillator with the comb filter set to high feedback and filter keytrack set to 100%. Then the combfilter basically becomes a synth voice. But we have to manually tune the frequency of the comb filter to make the notes match with the single cycle waveform.
It seems to work fine for me. My adventure kid scw seem to preview as the factory ones. If not you might be able to tag them? Not sure about the latter as I haven’t needed it so far.