I’ve always loved Wavetable synths, since the Korg Wavestation back in the 90’s some of the most striking sounds I’ve heard have owed something to this overlooked synthesis method. UVI Falcon offers wavetable synthesis as one of its many synthesis techniques and if you have Falcon as part of your Pro Tools subscription then you already have access to this technique but for those of us who don’t and want to explore Wavetable synthesis, or even for this of us who do have Falcon but want to explore it on a mobile device then Scythe offers a very capable wavetable synthesiser in iOS and best of all, it’s free.
What Is Wavetable Synthesis?
Wavetable Synthesis was originally developed by Wolfgang Palm and its first implementation was found in the PPG Wave synthesiser of 1980. At this time digital synthesis and the use of sampling was very restricted in terms of the amount of sampled data which could be stored but very interesting timbral changes could be made by storing many different single cycle samples of waveforms and by arranging them in a list, called a wavetable and playing through the wavetable at different speeds and in different orders constantly changing timbres which couldn’t be achieved using other methods could be achieved with ease.
Scythe
This free iOS synth creates evolving timbres which range from ethereal pads through to bizarre, tortured basses. Choose a preset and tweak or start with a wavetable and get modulating using the following:
2 Wavetable Oscillators
2 Envelope Generators
3 Low Frequency Oscillators
Modulation Matrix
Polyphonic Keyboard with up to 8 active voices
2 Filter Delay effect units • Wavetable Creator
How Does It Sound?
Listen to the examples below. If you want to record the results into your DAW look at my recent article about recording iOS devices via a lightning cable.
How Do I Get Scythe?
Go to the Bitmask Studio website or download Scythe from the App Store