Waldorf Nave - Manual (Page 55)

Sound Synthesis Basics
55 Nave User Manual
As soon as you play a note the envelope moves through
the wavetable positions generating different waveforms
over time.
The decay stage would move through these waves in the
opposite direction while ultimately holding a certain
wave at its sustain stage. When you release the note, the
envelope decays to zero.
Most Wavetables are created so that they start with a
hollow wave at position 0 and go through increasingly
brighter waves up to maximum position. This results in a
behaviour similar to a low pass filter so that they can be
controlled conveniently by an envelope.
If Attack is 0 and Decay set to a medium value you get a
percussive sound, if you turn up attack, you get a soft
sound start.
You can also use an LFO to modulate the wavetable
position and, depending on the selected LFO Shape, you
might get a wave scanning that goes back and forth (tri-
angle), only into one direction followed by a hard reset
to the origin (sawtooth up or down) or between only two
waves (square)
Exceeded Waves of a Wavetable
Of course you can combine envelope and keytrack mo-
dulations or add other modulation sources. All these
modulations will be added so that maybe the end or the
beginning of a wavetable could be exceeded. In this
case, the waves will be repeated cyclic.
Oscillators Introduction
The oscillator is the first building block of a synthesizer.
It delivers the signal that is transformed by all other com-
ponents of the synthesizer. In the early days of electronic
synthesis, engineers found that most real acoustic instru-
ment waveforms can be reproduced by using abstracted
electronic versions of these waveforms. They weren’t the
first who came to that conclusion, but they were the first
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32
16
0
Wave
Position
Running through the
envelope attack stage
generates this audio signal
Time