Waldorf M

The link to the waveterm library seems to be dead. Anyone know where to get the Term waves Vladi was talking about?

Have some time to try it out today. :slight_smile:

Iā€™ve been digging into Virsyn Pro wavetable oscillators and downloaded a bunch of tables from https://waveeditonline.com/ Are these tables compatible with the M, or do they require editing of some sort? Theyā€™re 16 bit, so thatā€™s all good, but maybe theyā€™re too long or something?

With over 600 tables, the saying ā€œtyranny of choiceā€ comes to mind!

Hereā€™s the ā€œhow toā€ video from Waldorf:

Iā€™m very tempted to get the board myself

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Thanks for the video!!! I am tempted to get the ex board as wellā€¦.

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Anybody? Have no M owners here (converted?) loaded tables from waveedit into the M?

EDIT: So I looked it up in the manual

ā€œThe wavetable file can contain waves from 1 up to
256. Each wave is a sequence of 256 signed 8-bit samples.ā€

I dunno why I wrongly remembered it took 16 bit samples.

Have any M owners here converted the tables from the source above? If so what do you use?

I personally havenā€™t, the transitions were easy enough but Iā€™ve read enough confusion over the wavetable import that Iā€™m taking the easy option and waiting until some enterprising soul makes a quick and easy conversion tool :sweat_smile:

I actually feel like Iā€™m in a bit of an endless ā€˜waitingā€™ thing with the M in general, I love it but Iā€™ve ended up not spending much time with it first due having to send it away for repair, then having a feeling of wanting the firmware to become totally settled. Thatā€™s looking close now but has been replaced by ā€˜I bet the keyboard announcement wonā€™t be far away now that theyā€™ve re-established the Quantum as their flagship productā€™.

If I was considering the potential cost and hassle of the expansion Iā€™d definitely be concerned the keyboard would then be immediately announced. Itā€™ll be ungodly expensive no doubt and Iā€™ll take a fair hit on the M I bought new then had to throw more money at to get repaired, but at least from owning it I know a version with a Fatar poly-aftertouch keybed and release velocity would be something Iā€™d want to keep forever. Without having some first-hand experience I doubt Iā€™d have even considered paying what the keyboard would likely cost.

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Thanks for the info and insights. A bit lame that Waldorf hasnā€™t come up with a wavetable editor for the M. I guess if they release a keyboard version with 32 voices (and obviously much higher price), the onus will be on them to do so.

I donā€™t even want to consider how much 32 voices would be! To be honest 8 feels pretty luxurious to me but IIRC Vladimir has said a few times heā€™d like to do a 16 voice keyboard version so yeah, it wouldnā€™t be cheap. I could see maybe Ā£3000 if itā€™s four octaves (more likely to follow the Iridium that way than the Quantum, if I was guessing). The M was a terrifying level of purchase for me so itā€™s a testament to how nice it sounds that Iā€™m looking at that as a possibility!

I gather from his posts he hasnā€™t been full-time with Waldorf for a while and has been doing the firmware etc. on a freelance basis so Iā€™m just glad all those updates have happened and all the features survived that rocky period where things looked a bit in doubt. The only thing Iā€™d really like is Scala support which was supposedly on the roadmap from early on but I havenā€™t seen mentioned in a while.

I think someone will come up with a tool or at least a streamlined, reliable way of converting with other programs. Someone also seemed fairly well on the way to a VST editor but I think theyā€™re waiting for the firmware to settle which is obviously sensibleā€¦ I guess anyone working on a wavetable editor might be in the same position too.

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That link isnā€™t working for some reason but I copy/pasted https://ppg.synth.net/waveterm/wt_lib.shtml into my address bar and you can get there. Firefox gave me a security warning so I think somethingā€™s going on with their security certificate but the page looked fine to me.

Direct link to the samples here: https://ppg.synth.net/zip/lib_14_march_2001.zip

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I have used some of those. I imported them in to audacity and saved as unsigned 8bit. As thatā€™s the format M supported. But I think there is possible to import 16bit waves now.

But I now use demo version of Serum. It can export the correct format and has a lot of useful features to edit the wavetables.

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:+1: Would be great to get confirmation of 16 bit table import capability. Would they only work in Modern Mode? Iā€™m not sure I understand the difference between signed and unsigned samples. I presume theyā€™re points marking the beginning and end of the 8 samples in each of the 8 tables, or simply 64 markers for each sample irrespective of which of the 8 sample chains theyā€™re in?

Unsigned is just the wave data. Signed adds some information at the start I think.

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I just tried using the Waveterm transitions for the first time. Easy process.

I chose sample 631, a snare hit. When I played it back on OSC 2 I thought, WOW this really is dungeony, very crunchy.

Then I turned up the octave up by 2 steps and heard a nice clear snare.

Seems like the default pitch is 2 octaves low.

Also, the snare hits late, confirmed by playing it with a short envelope next to a note on OSC 1. I tried to fix this by scrolling through the sample with TR. START in the osc menu in case there was silence at the start of the sample. Took forever to turn the knob 1000 times, and didnā€™t work. It actually just quit playing the sample altogether 1/4 of the way through

So, I donā€™t know how Transitions are going to make this a 4 part drum machine, if it wonā€™t trigger in a timely manner next to the osc itā€™s playing with, or on the grid for that matter. Iā€™m still new to the M so maybe Iā€™m missing something.

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yeah a lot of the waveterm transitions have some blank space if front for whatever reason but it is easy enough to tune the start, holding shift I believe speeds up the parameter speed scrolling which makes that much quicker.

Does anyone have the list of the waveterm sounds? I feel like it used to be on the ppg.synth.net website but I am not finding it now and my old bookmark to it seems to just lead to a dead page.

edit
hmm I managed to worm my way too it, there is no longer any links to it on the page so I downloaded the page just incase.

PPG Webpages lib.html (218.3 KB)

this is it if anyone is having trouble grabbing it.

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Thank you very much! You saved the day with the shift command.

Unfortunately it only reads the adjusted start time if you have TR. LOOP on. The downside of that is if you want to pair the sound with a OSC 1 with any amp release dialled in, now the transition is going to be looping during that release whether you want it to or not.

From Vladis description with TR.LOOP off, it always starts from the beginning of the sample.

Hoping not a lot of the transitions start with silence

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Yeah, if you have one of the envelopes free though you can use it as a second adsr for the transition portion of the soundā€¦ personally I have had a lot of fun with the vocal and choir transitions, also has a very dungeon synth vibe from those.

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I have been lurking here on this thread for a bit now and was just going through the transition files and indeed many of them do start with silence or seemingly unrelated materialā€¦ Is there anything that prevents us from trimming them and using them that way?

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Nothing at all, you can use any short samples of the correct format you like, including trimmed versions of those.

The developer only posted those as examples since the Waveterm was kind of the precedent for adding the feature but he was really more encouraging people to put their own stuff into it.

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Iā€™ve only had my M for about a week and I definitely would not call myself a good sound designer, but I do always read the manual and try to get into the details. I have a couple questions.

  1. Iā€™m having some trouble getting the modulations I want. modulating pitch with a wave envelope or LFO or modulating the VCA, the modulations seem pretty weak. If I modulate the VCA with LFO1 as source and MAX as the sidechain 64+ set, nothing happens, but when I select ā€˜Inverseā€™ I can hear it working. But even when I select a square wave, I donā€™t think the changes in volume sound as abrupt as they should.

Just as the Amp changes sound weak, so does modulating pitch. Especially with the wave envelope, the range of change in pitch I can get is so small. I thought maybe it was affected by pitch bend range, but that didnā€™t seem to be the issue.

Am I misunderstanding how to choose mod source and sidechain control? How do you guys like to use them? Any good combinations you like?

  1. What is negative velocity? What should I be using the negative side of the velocity knob for? Sorry if stupid question!

  2. FM Filter and FM, and waveshaper too. What is the FM Filter? Donā€™t understand how to use it. And what is the waveshaper doing? Can I do FM by modulating the cutoff with a fast LFO? Can I do FM with this synth?

I know, many questions, but maybe others who lack some knowledge that isnā€™t in the manual could benefit too :slight_smile:

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You can do filter FM with the analog filter and the fast LFO, itā€™s not super fast but itā€™s into audio rates for sure. It sounds really nice. The FM filter and other special filter types need the ā€˜EXTRAā€™ parameter turned up to do their special stuff. The waveshaper filter puts the sound through a sine waveshaper (basically a flavour of distortion/saturation) then a filter. With the MShaper filter you can use whatever shape oscillator 2 is set to which is really cool. Check out the Microwave XT manual from page 52 onwards for descriptions of the special filters.

You can sort of do limited FM with a fast LFO on pitch. You can keytrack the LFO but itā€™s still more along the lines of exponential FM since it wonā€™t stay in tune. Real linear FM wouldā€™ve been amazing but I donā€™t think was ever on the cards with the limited processing available.

Negative velocity will work the same as any negative modulation really - say you have a patch where as the volume increases it starts to sound a bit too shrill, you could put some negative velocity on the filter cutoff to close the filter a bit as you play harder/louder.

I havenā€™t used the M much in a while as posted above so Iā€™ll let someone else guide you on question 1!

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