Kilohearts - Phase Plant Synthesizer

Discussion in 'Software' started by dirkdiddler, Jul 10, 2019.

?

Is the market saturated with wavetable synths?

  1. yes

    36.7%
  2. no

    40.0%
  3. might be soon...

    23.3%
  1. i0nzzz

    i0nzzz Noisemaker

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    Just dropping in to say that Phase Plant is the MOTHERFUCKING shit. The entire price debate is completely nonsensical. Yes it undoubtedly has an advantage and at a mere $10/mo for EVERYTHING... I'm sure sparing one meal for the sum of what you're getting from such a powerful synth is completely worth every single one of the 1,000 pennies spent on it that month...

    I dropped $200 on Massive X only to be more disappointed than I've ever been when it came down to attempting to implement it into my personal productions as it simply destroyed my workflow. I do regret that but I've learned to just avoid and cancel out Massive X posts completly because it's now irrelevant to me.

    As for the snapins, realistically they already had a footprint prior to Phase Plants initial debut... I think if you have a quality plugin that costs X amount and provides you with everything you could've hoped for +more, which happened to replace which once was your "go to" VI (Serum) *cough cough* then the price shouldn't even be a factor. Personally the price doesn't even Phase me :yes: I truly love Phase Plant and it simply works for me.

    As this has all unraveled I've noticed the "hipster effect" occur, for the lack of better words... where those who are finding reasons to complain about about Phase Plant - truly have no desire to use it, mainly for the fact that they don't want to ride the incoming wave and choose to be different. However there's truth in some of the arguments, the negativity truly shouldn't bleed into the threads of those who appreciate the synth and take the time to share their opinion.

    At the end of the day forums are full of opinions and everybody has to state their own to let it be known, as I just did...

    Damn, I could've spent all this time sound designing instead of regurgitating what has been said over and over again. I've already went through this on Reddit.

    I don't think the market is oversaturated with wavetable synths, I think it's oversaturated with opinions. Just use what works for you and finish tracks. It will get you much further than participating in an endless debate.

    Much love Kilohearts and Kilohaters :rofl:
     
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  2. sardoumichel

    sardoumichel Member

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    Yes they don't have fancy wooden vintage 3 d GUI but they are everything but mediocre :dont:
     
  3. fiction

    fiction Audiosexual

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    There is still a lot that could be improved in Wavetable Synths.
    The simple task of converting a real-world sample into a wavetable is still a challenge for them: Some signals work well, others are barely recognisable after being transformed into a wavetable and used for sound design.
    WT synthesis and additive synthesis have a lot of commonality in the way they generate sound because both are periodic and "morphable" over time. A set of partials and a wavetable slot are interchangeable - two different representations of the same data, as long as phase information is preserved in the spectrum.

    There are some workarounds to improve on the reproduction of (attack) transients, like PPG's "Time Compressed Samples" or just samples like in KH Phaseplant, but I don't know of any WT synth that has a more effective method of reproducing transients and making their parameters as accessible as common wavetables while actually sounding good.

    So I think there's still a lot of room for improvement, and even phaseplant, although a very nice combination of modules, does not introduce anything new on the wavetable front.
     
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  4. i0nzzz

    i0nzzz Noisemaker

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    This ^^^
     
  5. 23322332

    23322332 Rock Star

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    All digital synths use wavetables (including hardware digital oscillators). Check any dsp book. It's too expensive and unpractical (unless your CPU is the size of your house or something) to generate waveforms with math formulas. It's up to other code to make them more non-linear/unstable along with filters, amps, envelopes.
     
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  6. 23322332

    23322332 Rock Star

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    See Infinite pro by Wolfgang Palm (the PPG guy). It's basically an additive synth, masked as wavetable. Should also be able resynthesize many sounds and noise (transients).
    Additive synthesis can resynthesize also inharmonic waveforms.
    The thing is that additive synths are with limited number of partials - Harmor has 1024, I think. You will probably need way more for perfect resynthesis. Controlling the partials to create morphs is another hard task.
     
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  7. Lois Lane

    Lois Lane Audiosexual

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    I actually enjoy those cute little box snapins. They are no muss, no fuss and just do the job. Hass and Stereo are easy steasy and...BANG...the bonus is that they fit in the change pocket of my jeans. I can take them everywhere and they keep my guitar picks from feeling lonely and frightened while in that tiny dark space!
     
  8. fiction

    fiction Audiosexual

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    Nobody said it's an easy task
    But developers who just combine technology from existing products certainly won't make me buy a second wavetable synth for a rather high price.
     
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  9. Gyro Gearloose

    Gyro Gearloose Audiosexual

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    indeed
     
  10. fiction

    fiction Audiosexual

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    The main issue with resynthesis is that for reproducing sounds perfectly, you not only need the partials (sinewave amplitudes) but also the phase information for each partial, plus partials at frequencies that are not necessarily covered to reproduce inharmonic content.
    And all these have to be changed much faster than usual envelopes can do.
    I think there's still a lot of ideas waiting to be cooked into new products.
     
  11. nobodyspecial

    nobodyspecial Platinum Record

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    but ok effects are nice internally but. make this synth 50 euros and let me use my own effects , would be a good deal too.
    my hw moogs have no effects either but they are considered monsters
     
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  12. fiction

    fiction Audiosexual

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    Yes and no. You can pre-calculate waveforms for every pitch to avoid cpu-intensive realtime interpolation, but you cannot pre-calculate realtime interpolation between different wavetable frames, otherwise you couldn't modulate them in realtime.
    In other words, most synths use pre-calculated waveform lists but only wavetable synths support realtime interpolation between them.
     
  13. And that guy in the videos has like the voice of Brylcreem. It all just whispers don't go there. I don't even have the try before you buy version.
     
  14. Except the Yamaha DX Series.
     
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  15. 23322332

    23322332 Rock Star

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    ?
    It's a bank of sine wave wavetable for operators! (and they are very low quality, compared to modern audio standards for audio sample rate and bit rate, leading to crappy, aliased sounds)
     
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  16. No it isn't. You can check Chowning's original patent if you don't believe me, but think about it hard, just for one minute. If you aren't mathematically generating both the carrier and modulator however are you going to calculate the FM operator product. It has to be done without a ROM. And you'd need a wavetable for every possible wave. Since 1977 even...

    Journal Article
    Design of a Digital Oscillator Which Will Generate Up to 256 Low Distortion Sine Waves in Real Time
    John Snell
    Computer Music Journal
    Vol. 1, No. 2 (April, 1977), pp. 4-25
    Published by: The MIT Press
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/23320137
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 17, 2019
  17. 23322332

    23322332 Rock Star

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    They implemented phase modulation in DX7, not FM.
    Anyway, the technique doesn't matter that much - it is amusing that various modulation synthesis techniques are perfect for creating pseudo acoustic instruments, but are really famous in these days of sample libraries only for making robotical dubstep noises, wow.
     
  18. Moonlight

    Moonlight Audiosexual

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    Try Avenger demo ! Drop in your own samples and have fun with it !

    grap another softsynth, add effects until you cpu glows, create a multisample, load in avenger, now you have a cool cpu and a glowing sound :) plant doesnt load multisamples...

    Why dont you try the DEMO before spending so much money ?
     
    Last edited: Jul 17, 2019
  19. Moonlight

    Moonlight Audiosexual

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