Operator's new 'hidden' waveshape capabilities
Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2005 10:36 pm
During L5 beta testing period Robert posted the following about a new Operator feature..
Since this is not covered in the manual or the Operator Lessons I thought that some of you might find it interesting to read..
To me it still sounds a bit rocket-science-ish, but after trying it out myself I really enjoyed the sound..
Maybe Robert can write a Operator Lesson for this?
Cause it's kinda hidden for the non-die-hard FM programmers..
Since this is not covered in the manual or the Operator Lessons I thought that some of you might find it interesting to read..
To me it still sounds a bit rocket-science-ish, but after trying it out myself I really enjoyed the sound..
Maybe Robert can write a Operator Lesson for this?
Cause it's kinda hidden for the non-die-hard FM programmers..
He elaborated a bit on this topic..Robert Henke wrote:If you like Operator I have some good news for you:
Live 5 brings some little enhancements:
- fixed freqency can go down to 0 Hz, allowing to use an oscillator as waveshaper
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
