roboctopus — The Kinda Sorta Supersaw-lite; or, a Beefy Saw Bass (2013)

A short post with one instrument and one abandoned idea, both worth recording.

Key claims#

• The idea that did not work: a real supersaw is "one oscillator sound[ing] like 7 (!) detuned saw waves", and in principle you could do that on the wave channel "by hand drawing slightly out-of-sync waveforms and using frame switching in the WAV channel" — but "the WAV channel synth is a bit noisy when switching frames, so it doesn't sound very clean". Written in 2013, before LSDj 7's silky wave; he says he will keep experimenting.
• The instrument that did work: a single hand-drawn wave "based on the shape of the supersaw waveform … a great bass patch with good treble definition and a nice low end". The shape is an image in the raw article, not a value list.
• A method worth stealing: "if you hear a cool waveform you want to replicate in LSDJ, an easy way to achieve it is to do a google image search (I searched 'supersaw waveform' haha) and just try to approximate the shape in the WAV screen."

Practical takeaways#

• Approximating the shape of a known synth waveform is a legitimate way to design a wave — the picture is the spec.
• Frame-switched detuning (the supersaw route) fights the wave channel's frame-change noise; that constraint is the same one the ghost-channel hits from the other side, and the one LSDj 7 later softened.

Relevance to the wiki#

A documented failed attempt is useful: it marks the boundary of what frame switching could do in 2013 and why. The Google-image-search trick is a practical addition to wavetable-programming.

To verify#

• The waveform itself is only an image; no sample values are given, so the patch cannot be reproduced from the text (unverified by values).

Pages touched#

wavetable-programming · instrument-design · detune · ghost-channel · lsdj · roboctopus