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3rd Wave User Manual
How to Sound Like a Vintage PPG
Use “Upper Wavetable”
The other factor is the Upper Wavetable. The PPG had a “UW” control
that stood for “Upper Wavetable.” It had the effect of using the upper
wavetable waveforms, (which are the varied set of waveforms found in
wavetable P30), if you modulated past the end of a selected wavetable in
the PPG.
On the 3rd Wave, this setting is found in the Wave Flow menu (press
the Wave Flow button). If you set “Use Upper Wavetable” to “off” on
the 3rd Wave, wave sweeping will always stop at offset 59 for the “P”
wavetables. This is due to the fact that the last 4 waveforms in all of the
“P “ wavetables are always triangle, pulse, square, and sawtooth as they
were in the PPG. These are 8-bit and operate with the same lack of lter-
ing as the rest of the wavetable. To hear these last four positions, turn on
the
use upper wavetable. They are great for lo- emulations of analog
waveforms, but for high-delity “analog” subtractive synthesis, use the
waveforms in the set of “A” waves.
What did the upper wavetable and the UW on/off switch do on the PPG?
Two things. First the upper wavetable was always loaded in memory
whether the UW control on the PPG was on or off. This meant that if you
were at a particular offset in a wavetable and had an envelope or other
modulation set so that the you went past the end of the last position, you
would go right into this upper wavetable (P30) as far as the modulation
carried you (up to the full 64 positions if necessary).
Second, on the PPG you could make a stacked patch by creating two
different patches between what was called Group A and Group B. Any
patch would hold two different patches, one in A and one in B. They
could both be played at the same time if you used keyboard mode 1,
which gave you a stack that reduced polyphony to 4 notes. The problem
was that you had to use the same wavetable for both patches. So if you
selected wavetable 04, for example, it would use wavetable 04 for both
Group A and Group B. Your stack would be two different patches, but
both would use the same wavetable. The UW control let you get around
this by assigning wavetable 30, which was the “upper wavetable,” to
the Group A patch, and whatever wavetable you selected on the display,
(wavetable 04, for example), to the Group B patch. This was the only
way to create a stack with patches that used two different wavetables.
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