Hello Friends,
For a while now, I've been scripting a wavetable synth with HISE. Although I've been struggling along for a crazy-long time with it, I'm now getting close to something resembling a complete pro soft synth, with just about all the features I set out to include in it.
One thing still doesn't feel right yet: the quality of the wavetable sound. I don't have an artifact problem, but at times the sound can feel a bit broken up and not as sharp as I was hoping it would be, especially with the filter peak cranked. To understand this issue a bit more, I went to the Xfer Records page to look at Serum's features. Right away, I was hit with "ULTRA-CLEAN OSCILLATORS," the heading in one of the paragraphs. (Copied Below)
They claim Serum features advanced math that makes things sound better than basically any other wavetable synth on the market. It made me wonder how much of it is already built into the HISE wavetable synth and how much needed to be programmed in. Also, how much is just a marketing plan with no real advantage on HISE's wavetable synth.
Since I'm not a math nor coding expert, I come to you cracks for guidance. Please read Serum's description of their OSCs. Let me know if HISE already delivers this level of performance and I just need to do better with my wavetables, or if there is anything I can do (coding) that would bring the quality and sharpness of the sound to the highest possible level.
Thank you.
ULTRA-CLEAN OSCILLATORS
Playback of wavetables requires digital resampling to play different frequencies. Without considerable care and a whole lot of number crunching, this process will create audible artifacts. Artifacts mean that you are (perhaps unknowingly) crowding your mix with unwanted tones / frequencies. Many popular wavetable synthesizers are astonishingly bad at suppressing artifacts - even on a high-quality setting some create artifacts as high as -36 dB to -60 dB (level difference between fundamental on artifacts) which is well audible, and furthermore often dampening the highest wanted audible frequencies in the process, to try and suppress this unwanted sound. In Serum, the native-mode (default) playback of oscillators operates with an ultra high-precision resampling, yielding an astonishingly inaudible signal-to-noise (for instance, -150 dB on a sawtooth played at 1 Khz at 44100)! This requires a lot of calculations, so Serum’s oscillator playback has been aggressively optimized using SSE2 instructions to allow for this high-quality playback without taxing your CPU any more than the typical (decent quality) soft synth already does. Load up Serum and we think you’ll be able to notice both what you hear (solid high frequencies, extending flat all the way up to the limits of hearing) as well as what you don’t hear (no unwanted mud or aliasing gibberish- just good, clean sound).