Hello all,
I’ve had my OT for a couple of weeks now and really enjoying making noises with it so far. It’s such a flexible machine, and pretty intuitive considering there’s so much squeezed into a tiny box!
Anyway, I’m not sure if this has been discussed before, but I thought perhaps it was possible to use the OT to do wavetable synthesis. By this, I don’t just mean playing single cycle waveforms, but switching between different single cycle waveforms while playing. To test this out, I made a sample chain of 64 slightly varying single cycle waves. For simplicity, I started with a sine, and added one harmonic each time, so it begins to sound saw-toothy as you progess through the wavetables.
Once in the OT, I started by slicing it to 64 slices and setting the slider to modify the slice played, but realised that the new slice will only play when the note is retriggered. This could be fun, but I wanted to do it mid note for timbral variation. So, turning slicing off, I set the len parameter to “time” and the “len” to 2 - If the total sample is 128, then 2 is 1/64th. Now the sample start can be varied in real-time and the “wavetable” being played is modified. Result!
Unfortunately it sounds like shit. When you change the sample start parameter slowly, it isn’t too bad, with the occasional click, but if you do it rapidly, it sounds awful. I guess as the OT is not designed to switch between wavetables in real time, there are a lot of artifacts. Interestingly, when moving quickly forward through the sample chain, the pitch is increased, and decreased when moving backward - I guess this is some kind of doppler effect.
Anyway, I thought I’d put this out there in the interests of sharing my half baked ideas and in the hope that someone might have an idea about how it might be improved. Suggestions very welcome. Also, the test file I created is at the link below, if you want to play. It’s tuned to 2 octaves below concert A.
Pete