Zebralette 3 Additive Engine Discussion

[inktome]

slow, subtle drift

It's not slow at all. It takes a matter of seconds for the phase drift to be hugely concerning

[quauauuauaua]

gotta agree with the other folks here.
if the additive engine says its putting out a saw wave and the fundamental is drifting, that is VERY far from expected behavior.

[inktome]

It's not a bug

It's not listed as one, but it might as well be. IL Harmor and NI Razor, both additive synths over a decade old at this point, do not face similar phase coherence issues.

[pdxindy]

slow, subtle drift

It's not slow at all. It takes a matter of seconds for the phase drift to be hugely concerning

I brought it up myself as a possible bug and was told it isn't. For me, from a practical perspective, I'm not hearing an audible problem.

If I want to play a static unchanging wave, which sometimes I do, the Wavetable Renderer covers that. And the Additive Renderer sounds fantastic and I have been making many dozens of sounds with it. To my ears, it's the most pleasing additive engine I've heard to date in a software synth.

For this level of sound quality and versatility of sound creation tools, if it means that the partials drift some in order to have a reasonable cpu use, I'm fine with that. If you're not, try convincing Urs.

[Urs]

Sorry, we're not going to change this. It is not an issue at all for the sounds that the engine is supposed to do.

This is a stripped down freeware version of something that's going to be a full version (but is released earlier, for various reasons...). In that full version - Zebra 3 - one will be able to freely combine inharmonic spectra (where the drift does not matter at all) with perfectly harmonic spectra - where the drift is not happening.

[Urs]

Also, please note that Additive Synthesis and our Additive Renderer are two separate things.

Classic Additive Synthesis is done by setting Osc Source to "Curve Spectrum" and Renderer to "Wavetable". This is classic Additive Synthesis where the Curve(s) represents the spectrum of the resulting waveform. Therefore, in Zebralette you can do Additive Synthesis perfectly fine without any drifting overtones.

The Additive Renderer on the other hand allows for rendering of inharmonic spectra. That is its purpose, and it is not a necessity for Additive Synthesis.

[underscoreraven]

Also, please note that Additive Synthesis and our Additive Renderer are two separate things.

Classic Additive Synthesis is done by setting Osc Source to "Curve Spectrum" and Renderer to "Wavetable". This is classic Additive Synthesis where the Curve(s) represents the spectrum of the resulting waveform. Therefore, in Zebralette you can do Additive Synthesis perfectly fine without any drifting overtones.

The Additive Renderer on the other hand allows for rendering of inharmonic spectra. That is its purpose, and it is not a necessity for Additive Synthesis.

This is a good explanation and it may be wise to make this distinction a bit more explicit in the manual, as I can see this being a common misconception down the line.

And even though it was originally just for CPU reasons I find the unstable phasing situation to be an interesting quirk of the engine that one may even consider in line with the goal of the engine, when understood this way

[Urs]

We might call the Additive Renderer something else then. Maybe something reminiscent to cloud/texture/swarm.

[glorkglunk]

If it's working like you said in the full version of z3 I have no issue, completely understandable that the freeware version is more stripped down, and I agree that it's a pretty interesting quirk. But I'm also not getting the Additive Renderer and Curve Spectrum (or the other frequency domain osc fx) confused.

A good reason to use the Additive Renderer when making tonal sounds is that just a little bit of an envelope on the spectral distortion knob then turning it off completely can result in some pretty interesting harmonic phases that as far as I'm aware would require hundreds of points to make in the wavetable renderer. You might also want something like that to be consistent if you plan to go further with distortion for example.

[marcinrau]

Hi, so I just grabbed the beta and I'm absolutely blown away and already love the whole plugin especially the additive sounds it can generate. I just found two things that might cause some confusion/could be interesting.

When going into the Init preset and setting the mode to additive it sounds quite wierd/noisy and way less sharp than the wavetable mode. This seems to be due to the Phase reset being on Random. I suspect this was also the issue inktome had in the post above, as with random disabled the pitch shift seems minimal and takes quite a while to become audible.

So I think it would be a great idea to just default the Phase Reset to Reset in the additive mode and that would just fix the issue I guess.
Also I wouldn't change name of the Additive Rendering Mode, as it sounds like you would expect it to be. When I hear cloud/texture/swarm I don't really know what I'm supposed to expect.

Also a second Idea, more on the Visual side of the additive engine. I suspect internally you know the position of the partials so it might be cool to display them as lines on their Frequency when the rendering is set to additive and the plot to frequency.
That would not only look really cool, but it would also display the spectral effects way better and allow you to see what is going on.

Hope that finds it's way into the Zebralette and thank you for this amazing sounding additive engine. Now back to exploring xD.

[Tuskerfort]

Since I have easy access to additive synths which provide the static and precise end of the sonic spectrum, I am thrilled that Z3 will lean toward organicity. It's a value judgement and a design preference. At the end of the day, we all wish to touch the emotions.

[aMUSEd]

Since I have easy access to additive synths which provide the static and precise end of the sonic spectrum, I am thrilled that Z3 will lean toward organicity. It's a value judgement and a design preference. At the end of the day, we all wish to touch the emotions.

Exactly

[pdxindy]

Since I have easy access to additive synths which provide the static and precise end of the sonic spectrum, I am thrilled that Z3 will lean toward organicity. It's a value judgement and a design preference. At the end of the day, we all wish to touch the emotions.

Plus, as Urs pointed out, Zebralette 3 can do precise additive as well. It's not like that option is missing.

[psychichotline]

Is this type of additive somewhat similar to how NI Razor does it, where you create a waveshape then convert that into additive partials for later manipulation?

[Andreya_Autumn]

When writing this: viewtopic.php?p=8854761#p8854761

...this thought came up: How about a spectral distortion mode that tunes each harmonic to the nearest interval of 12-equal (or whatever tuning system is loaded).

Changing the overtone series to the tempered tuning can create some very interesting results. Notably, tempered chords can be made to sound more "in tune", kinda like just-intonation chords do with regular harmonic overtones. Such sounds get messy if using too much distortion in mixing, but none the less it can sound really cool!

To my knowledge there's no currently active synth out there that does this, at least not easily. So this would be a super cool add!