We are all just waves in a wavetable...

Last month I received a Facebook message stating I had been tagged in this image from Billy Kurniadi's Photos. I noted the custom wood knobs, and thought, how cool, so of course I posted it. I saw a ton of other names tagged as well, many I recognized like James Maeier aka Carbon111 who hosts the excellent XT resource site, Stefan Trippler who hosts trippler.net, Wolfram Franke and Stefan Stenzel of Waldorf, Wolfgang Palm of PPG, the father of wavetable synthesis, and too many others to list here. See Facebook here for the full list. I thought we were all tagged to check out the wood knobs. I'm sure this was the case, however, there might have been another reason. What didn't occur to me at the time was what might have been the actual reference to the tagged names. We are all just waves in a wavetable, waves in synthesis. That is pretty cool.

For those not familiar with wavetable synthesis, in short, a wavetable synth uses wavetables for it's main oscillators. Rather than a basic saw, square, sine, triangle or sample as the source waveform, you have access to a table of multiple single cycle waveforms. A single cycle waveform is pretty much a single snapshot of what you'd see in an oscilloscope. Think of a wavetable as a spreadsheet with each cell containing a different snapshot. In the XT, each wavetable has 64 cells. You can either select one of the static waveforms and use it as an oscillator waveform like you would a saw, square or other waveform, or you can "sweep" through the table by applying any available modulation source like an LFO or envelope. This is how you get evolving textures out of a wavetable synth. For more see Carbon111t's site and Till Kopper's Waldorf FAQ site.

Update: I originally stated Stefan Trippler hosted the Waldorf FAQ site. It's actually Till Kopper.

If you can't get to the Facebook link, click below for the list.

"In this photo: Holger Steinbrink (photos), Kenan Loui, Pandan P. Purwacandra, Alexander Irwan (photos), Wolfram Franke (photos), Liza Wibisono (photos), Scott A. Sundberg, TheBabams Versus Storn (photos), Haibin Wu (photos), Tedja Prasetya (photos), Matrixsynth Jones (photos | remove tag), Wolfgang Dueren (photos), Paul Kevin Wiffen (photos), Mahesa Putra L (photos), Jörg Hüttner (photos), Wolfgang Palm (photos), Amil Juniwalu, Ruslan Bozhok (photos), Harkuswo Hartono, Motavis Jones (photos), Erich Vön Düssen, Rob Papen (photos), Stefan Stenzel (photos), Hanny E Putra Full (photos), Ekooh Setiawan (photos), Erwin Badudu Full (photos), James Maier (photos), Joseph Wijaya Tanandika (photos), Stefan Trippler (photos), Natasha Claudia Davega II (photos), Yessi Kristianto (photos), Mekson Bintang, vivi pedraglio (photos), Sayer Seely (photos), Norman Tri Permadi, Laurensius Steven, Jake Whale, Santoso Widjaja, Martin Hoewner (photos), Albert Juwono (photos), Evans Storn (photos), Danger Dope, Dotty Nugroho, Leonard 'Nyo' Kristianto (photos), Andibayou Dua (photos), Pramadi Adityo (photos), Ferdinand Marsa"