Simple wave generator

Ok so right now there’s this really cool thing you can do, that’s done in one of the stock drumkits (best way imo to learn about R3 capabilities is to look at the stock instruments), is to make a silent sample that’s just a line across the top and play it through a ring mod to generate a tone (or the lofimat for noise). This is a cool way to design some sounds, specifically drums and weird noises, but isn’t terribly useful for pitched instruments. Of course, that’s to be expected because this is sort of going above a beyond what it was actually intended to do, the ring mod is supposed to be a ring mod not a generator.

So why not have a dedicated generator DSP with the most ultrabasic of controls? Just generate a tone, be able to toggle keyboard mode or choose frequency mode, pulse width slider, and maaayyyybe a unison effect?

Will this generator DSP render directly into what you can hear or does it go into the “Waveform” first?

I’m not 100% sure I understand the question, but I think “render directly into what you hear” is what I had in mind. Just, when a note is triggered, play the tone on top of whatever other signal is there if any. And if no signal, just the tone by itself. But I guess that might not work the way I was thinking though, because that wouldn’t let you apply pitch envelopes…

Maybe instead of a dsp, just something you can put in place of a sample?

I personally wouldn’t mind if the pitch envelope would be disabled (or pre-buffered?) in this special case.

That would be nice. I think an important matter for the devs will be, how they can add this without changing or adding too much. Most of the past requests have been “add a [basic/modular/native] synthesizer”, which is - honestly - like “make it a big and ready DAW”. Now that in R3 the instruments have modulations just like modern softsynths, there’s just the generator missing. And I wouldn’t mind it to be band-limited, well, it would certainly be.

That’s what I think. It’s like, 99% of the way there. When you load up a single cycle waveform sample it’s pretty much a powerful synth in it’s own right, very little you can’t do. Implement a simple generator and it’s 100% there imo.

I think it’s maybe a bit more complex. At least for the square wave you usually
want pulse width modulation, eg. modulated by an LFO or Envelope or the count
of pigeons sitting on your door step.

I think they should improve the (hidden) formula device so that it can run at audio rates, then you could simply put in sin(x) and you have an instant sine wave, you can then create saw’s and saw waves by stacking sine waves.

I also remember Cas sticking his whole Overtune tool into a formula device and you can generate nice waveforms with that, I also wrote a squarewave lfo with PWM.

So you can generate complex waveforms in the formula device, but not at audio rates, if they fixed this then everything else you need for modular synths is already there. You could then have formula devices packaged up in doofers that would provide the front ends for wave generators.

There is a modular software called Audulus (mac/ipad) that lets you do this - use formulas to create oscillators, so it can be done in realtime. The only issue I can see with this approach would be aliaising but I’m pretty sure that could be worked around.

I’ve also added some brainstorming inspired by u-he Zebra here Some brainstorming on a possible wave generator
The idea there is actually to get there with simple additions, still having it visually appealing and easy.