Wavetable Synthesis - From Sound on Sound magazine

SOS contributor Steve Howell: Wavetable synthesis is actually quite easy to understand. In the early days
of synthesis, (analogue) oscillators provided a limited range of waveforms, such as sine, triangle, sawtooth
and square/pulse, normally selected from a rotary switch. This gave the user a surprisingly wide range of
basic sounds to play with, especially when different waveforms were combined in various ways.

The PPG Wave wavetable synthesizer. This one belongs to synth programmer, engineer and producer Nigel
Bates.
However, in the late '70s, Wolfgang Palm used 'wavetable' digital oscillators in his innovative PPG Wave
synths. Instead of having just three or four waveforms, a wavetable oscillator can have many more say, 64
because they are digitally created and stored in a 'look-up table' that is accessed by a front-panel control.
As you move the control, so you hear the different waveforms as they are read out of the table the control
is effectively a 64-way switch. If nothing else, this gives a wide palette of waveforms to use as the basis of
your sounds. However, the waveform-selection control is not a physical switch as such, but a continuously
variable control implemented in software. The advantage this has (apart from the 60 extra waveforms!) is
that it is also possible to use LFOs or envelopes or MIDI controllers to step through these waveforms.
Now, if the waveforms are sensibly arranged, we can begin to create harmonic movement in the sound. For
example, if Wave 1 is a sine wave and Wave 64 is a bright square wave with Waves 2 to 63 gradually getting
brighter as extra harmonics are added in each step of the wavetable, as you move through the wavetable,
you approach something not unlike a traditional filter sweep. However, one disadvantage to this (but
something that characterised the PPG) is that the sweep will not be smooth the waveforms will step in
audible increments.
Each oscillator in the PPG, however, didn't just have one wavetable there were 32 wavetables, each with
64 waveforms! Many were simple harmonic progressions as described above; others were rudimentary
attempts at multi-sampling, whilst others attempted to emulate oscillator sync sweeps and PWM (pulse-width
modulation) effects. Because the wavetable sweeping was so audibly stepped, the latter two weren't entirely
convincing emulations, though they had a character all their own nonetheless.
Where things begin to get interesting, however, is when the waveforms in the wavetable are disparate and
harmonically unrelated, as the tonal changes become random and unpredictable. For many, this feature of
wavetable synthesis was unusable, but some creative individuals like Tom Dolby exploited it to create unique
and distinctive sounds, as can be heard on his 1982 album The Golden Age Of Wireless.
The PPG had something of a trump up its sleeve, however totally analogue filters! Using these, it was
possible to smooth out the wavetable sweeps. Another endearing quality of the PPG was its low-resolution
digital circuitry, which exhibited aliasing at extreme frequencies that added a certain 'gritty' quality to the
sound. Later manifestations of the PPG (in Waldorf products) were of a higher quality and offered smooth
wavetable sweeping. But while they sounded better, they lacked that (arguably) essential 'lo-fi' character.
Other synths have employed wavetable synthesis in one guise or another since then and there are several
software synths available today which incorporate wavetable synthesis capabilities.