Week 5: Wavetable Synth

I thought the Wavetable synth would be a lot easier to experiment around with, but it turns out that making something that sounds good harder than the other instruments so far.

It has a synth sound, not an instrument sound and has tech underpinnings that are key to understanding it.

Instead of a sine wave, etc that makes a sound, say at 440Hz, you can use a recorded waveform. A wavetable synth gives the user not just one waveform at a time, but a stack or “table” of different waveforms. Using digital movements between the waves, you can transition between the different shapes in the table, allowing sounds that shift and evolve, with a liveliness not found in more basic sample-based synths.

It’s pretty cool and these can be used to harmonize different tracks. They seem like a good representation of data — data to digital synth and could be a more easier translatable data pattern than some of the others that I’ve played with.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations.