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3rd Wave User Manual
Creating Custom Wavetables
Some Technical Details About the Wave Maker
Before you use the Wave Maker, it’s useful to know how it works. As
explained earlier, a wavetable has waveforms that are a single cycle. A
single-cycle waveform contains a certain number of samples before it
repeats. The number of samples in the cycle is called its period length.
This number of samples between repeats corresponds to the note or the
pitch produced by the 3rd Wave. The period length that the 3rd Wave
uses is 1024 samples.
This is important because for the Wave Maker to analyze and convert
audio into a wavetable with a 1024 sample period length, it is mathemat-
ically optimal to have an audio recording with a pitch of 93.75 Hz (MIDI
note F#1).
When the 3rd Wave analyzes a recording, it will try to move the source
audio’s pitch to 93.75 Hertz or to 187.50 Hertz (one octave higher) in
order to make the best wavetable it can. If the source audio has a single
detectable pitch, the 3rd Wave’s Wave Maker tool can shift that pitch to
one of these two pitch frequencies.
The Wave Maker will look for areas in the source audio where the
timbre changes and extract those to make the 64 waves that comprise the
wavetable. If the timbre of the source audio changes only minimally, the
extracted waveshapes will be very harmonically similar. If the timbre of
the source audio changes dramatically over the length of the sample, the
extracted waveshapes will be very harmonically different.
If you record noise or a sound that has either multiple pitches or no pitch
at all, the 3rd Wave will still make a wavetable, but it may sound quite
different than the source audio.
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