I’m back with a new pack! I’ve recently been to Machina Bristronica 2024 and being surrounded with lots of gear and witnessing amazing performances of Anthony Rother and Surgeon for the first time sparked my interest in sound design once again!
This time I focused on wavetable synthesis. As you know, DTII is not the best device for wavetable synthesis really (with obvious limitations amount of cycles and no morphing in between them), but with some clever workarounds (and LOTS of trial and error) I was able to create wavetables that work decently with Digitakt II.
(Thanks to @taro for mentioning the amazing Octave environment, where I wrote a custom script to convert the wavetables I created out of Vital to be compatible with DTII. Otherwise I would still be wrestling with bash scripts and ffmpeg and/or sox!)
I have this habit of limiting myself to “a single piece of gear” when working on a musical project (and I’m too lazy to set everything up on my very limited space every time I want to compose music) so I’m usually looking for ways to push the limits of what each device can do. This pack was one of the results of this habit. Sometimes I want to produce tracks with a wide palette of sounds I can modulate to the hell and back just using DTII!
it’s the combination of A LOT of trial and error, octave scripting, workarounds for the limitations, wavetable fiddling with Vital, and sound design using all the tools DTII provides
i introduced a subtle crossfade between each cycle for some of the wavetables but the main trick is to create “tamed” wavetables that has “controlled” changes as i an use 1 out of 4 cycles from a 256 cycle wavetable i created using Vital (because I need 64 slices). the reason i mention it was A LOT of trial and error is: the 26 wavetables in the pack are a selection between 100+ wavetables i created, the others (i didn’t put into the pack) were too clicky to be used as proper wavetables. they are good to loop as single cycles (looping each slice) but perhaps i’ll release them as a “single cycle chain” pack later, rather than wavetables that can be smoothly modulated.
there can rarely be very subtle clicks based on your envelope or having portamento on or off, but the video is for you to judge. some of them even jump to random slices instead of smoothly modulating! i just “played” some demo presets live instead of using them in the context of a full pattern (even though they would be almost impossible to notice within a full beat) so everyone can hear and decide whether those rare clicks are acceptable or not.
It seemed working with single cycles was a lost art. I was fortunate to use a EMU ESI-32 that has a calculator for single cycles of certain pitchs. I made this video covering the topic with old school samplers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up8ktwWWNi4
