Ableton Forum

Great add-ons

Looks like the covert operators will have some fun

didn't know this Robert. great new addons

same here
thanx

and patchmanagement in 5 should be a welcome feature too!

Robert Henke wrote: Live 5 brings some little enhancements:

- fixed freqency can go down to 0 Hz, allowing to use an oscillator as waveshaper

Best, Robert Henke / Ableton

Robert,
can you elaborate a bit on this?
what does it exactly mean?

Hi Poster,

this is a bit difficult to explain. A "waveshaper" is an object which maps incoming amplitude values to new outgoing amplitude values.
Imagine a speaker. If you appy 0 Volt to it, the membrane stays at position 0.
Now apply a positive voltage to it and the membrane moves some millimeters in one direction. if you change the polarity, you get the same movement in the other direction. In an ideal world the movement would be proportinal to the voltage.
If you would draw a curve on paper where one axis is voltage and the other axis is movment you would get a straight line thru the origin ( is this the correct eng. term ???).

Of course at some point if you increase the volume the speaker will reach an mechanical endpoint and the movement will be slower then expected.

If you draw this on paper the curve will get flatter in this region.
As a result if you play a sinewave thru the speaker and you increase the level at some point the shape of the sinewave gets distorted and the loudest peaks will be flattened in some way. This is exactly what waveshaping does.
It reshapes incoming signals by a mathematical function.

In Operator these functions are already there: it is the waveforms of the oscillator.

If the curve of oscillator A is a sinewave and oscillator B is also a sinewave, oscillator A will distort this sinewave, depending on the volume of oscillator B.
Very important for the sound of the distortion is the fact that the whole wavefom of the waveshaper can be shifted by the "phase" parameter.
If i find the time I will put up a short example later today.
It does not matter if you completly understand whats going on as long as the result sounds great anyway.

Best, Robert Henke / Ableton

http://www.monolake.de/waveshaperOP.mp3

Oscillator A has the Sine waveform, and the frequency is set to fixed "0".
Oscillator B has the Sqaure4 waveform. and modulates ( here: feeds ) Oscillator A. I changed the phase of Osc. A with a clip envelope, this creates the different flavours of the sound during the example. No filters , fx etc here, just the two Osciallators.

Robert

for the experts: we currently do not filter out any DC offset which might occur as a result. It is easy enough to do it with one band of an eq4. maybe at some point
a DC blocker is part of the Utility device....

Robert Henke wrote:Hi Poster,

this is a bit difficult to explain. A "waveshaper" is an object which maps incoming amplitude values to new outgoing amplitude values.
Imagine a speaker. If you appy 0 Volt to it, the membrane stays at position 0.
Now apply a positive voltage to it and the membrane moves some millimeters in one direction. if you change the polarity, you get the same movement in the other direction. In an ideal world the movement would be proportinal to the voltage.
If you would draw a curve on paper where one axis is voltage and the other axis is movment you would get a straight line thru the origin ( is this the correct eng. term ???).

Of course at some point if you increase the volume the speaker will reach an mechanical endpoint and the movement will be slower then expected.

If you draw this on paper the curve will get flatter in this region.
As a result if you play a sinewave thru the speaker and you increase the level at some point the shape of the sinewave gets distorted and the loudest peaks will be flattened in some way. This is exactly what waveshaping does.
It reshapes incoming signals by a mathematical function.

In Operator these functions are already there: it is the waveforms of the oscillator.

If the curve of oscillator A is a sinewave and oscillator B is also a sinewave, oscillator A will distort this sinewave, depending on the volume of oscillator B.
Very important for the sound of the distortion is the fact that the whole wavefom of the waveshaper can be shifted by the "phase" parameter.
If i find the time I will put up a short example later today.
It does not matter if you completly understand whats going on as long as the result sounds great anyway.

Best, Robert Henke / Ableton

thanks for the 'visual' explanation.. I sort of understand it now..
sounds interesting,
as you said it's better to hear what it does ,
but I also like to know the theoretical side of things..

thanks for the demo,
sounds very promising...
I guess also in combination with the new wave forms..

cool example. are you using 0 hz for modulating? I can imagine 1 hz would modulate, but with 0 hz I would not expect any change in sound because of this.

but you are right, it's the sound what matters. interesting example. little gameboy-ish sound

the modulation comes due to the clip envelope applied to the phase parameter.
however, each little improvement cries for another one: free running mode for the oscillators. well, later....

Robert Henke / Abletron

thanks. yes free-mode and more complex-waveforms are my requests... but I don't need to beg. thanks for extra info, Operator is lovely! I will created a soundbank one day...

Thanks for the info Robert.
(I think the word you were looking for about the curves is "origo" if I'm not wrong).
Live 5 grows day by day, it feels.
// C

Robert,


Are there any plans to implement better midi mapping in Operator or Live, so that you can for instance, map the mod wheel to move the filter 60-80% as opposed to having to map it directly to the entire range of the knob?

Thanks Robert! I can't wait to try this out!