Theoretically, this should be possible. But you'd only want to do this with truly pure waveforms, which are kind of boring, and don't have the full flavour of the "authentic" retro/analogue synths that these plugins make sound so wonderful.

For own FM, I've been doing this single cycle wave creation and reading via DSP, for a little while now, where I completely control the environment and the shifting of pitch, as it's much more computationally quick/light to pre-render a waveform that's complex (I'm not just using sine waves), and then use cached memory copies to look up required samples than to calculate the shapes on the fly.

However, there's many ingredients to the magic sounding older synths that evolve over longer and shorter periods than the single wave cycle, and if you only use the single wave cycle, these other characteristics and flavourings are forced to loop/repeat at the wave cycle, and become different from their organically evolving-ness... so you're far better off figuring out the longest period of evolvement of these other characteristics, and looping at that point, which might be dozens of cycles, or even longer with warbling of various characteristics of the sound.

If this doesn't immediately make sense (I feel like I'm doing a very bad job of describing this), then let me know, and I'll try making a diagram to show what I'm attempting to describe.

yes, I'm aware of limitation of single-cycle waveforms, but nevertheless I'd like to give a shot. What tools are necessary to do it? I can't edit loop points on MODX itself, at least I couldn't find it.

Back in 2018 MONTAGE there was promotion involving a third party software called “SampleRobot”. At the introduction of the program (which automated sampling from one synth (cloning), with the finished product being a Montage File which you could load directly to the MONTAGE). The program has been out for several years now. You may want to look into this program. There was a time it was free to MONTAGE owners — it predated the MODX (no such free copy promotion was available for MODX, as far as I know)… but I believe you download a test version (free trial version).

Here is a link to the company web page: https://samplerobot.com/

See these articles/video for an idea of how it works to clone any synth:

https://yamahasynth.com/learn/applications/namm-2018-introducing-samplerobot-pro-montage

https://yamahasynth.com/learn/applications/samplerobot-montage-sampling-a-midi-instrument

yes, I'm aware of limitation of single-cycle waveforms, but nevertheless I'd like to give a shot. What tools are necessary to do it? I can't edit loop points on MODX itself, at least I couldn't find it.

SORRY!

In that case, there's a very long winded video that goes into some detail about the processes of manually making sounds from sounds. The mechanics of this can be applied to the single cycle wave form creation. Fair warning: without Sample Robot (mentioned by Bad Mister above), this process can be extremely tedious.

SampleRobot works perfectly with VST to Sample works, too. Outside of the trial, it's $300... it'd be nice if Yamaha made a simple app, that did this. AWM2 is immensely powerful by virtue of the fact that any samples can be dropped into it.

Again, sorry to have wasted your time and underestimated your knowledge and insights.

GOOD LUCK!

Here's the long winded vid on samples to waveforms. Fortunately he's charismatic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76Vh2p9S2GE

Thank you for the reply, Bad Mister (and thank you for all educational content you created - I learned a lot!). How did this company learn how to create Montage Files? Did they get documentation from Yamaha or did they have to reverse engineer the format? I'm asking because I'd would prefer to convert my single-cycle waveforms into MODX-compatible format in a programmatic way, instead of using any third party software I would use only once. Is specification of MODX file format available for download?

And last question: are there any plans to add some simple waveform edits to MODX in near future? Even something as simple as start, end, loop points would be awesome.

SampleRobot works perfectly with VST to Sample works, too. Outside of the trial, it's $300... it'd be nice if Yamaha made a simple app, that did this. AWM2 is immensely powerful by virtue of the fact that any samples can be dropped into it.

I'm on a Mac, so Logic's Auto Sampler would do the job as well for free if I wanted to sample full instrument (in fact I did auto sample one patch that turned out all right from my Virus - worked perfectly). I guess I'll have to abandon the original idea because it looks it is not supported and would require disproportional amount of effort.

I think we need Jason to weigh in. This seems like something he's probably done before.

Hey hey hey Piotr!

Just found this:

http://www.benis.it/cm/articoli/Montagewaveforms.htm

Use google translate, he's doing what you want.

Follow up article here:

http://www.benis.it/cm/articoli/Montage_wt_ws.htm

UPDATE:::

another very interesting article:

http://sandsoftwaresound.net/modx-get-started-with-sample-robot/

Hi MODX-ers,

is it possible to load single cycle waveforms into MODX and use them as oscillators? Specifically I'd like to be able to load into my MODX single-cycle, "vintage synths" WAV files coming from soft-synths I own.

--
piotr

Hello Piotr,

I have done some experiments in the past with single cycle waveforms, as I like exactly the same thing :).

First of all, there is no need for any fancy tool, you can just create a single cycle wave using any audio editor (I made them in audacity) and import. Just save them as a mini .WAV file. That's the good news.

However, there are some technical limits in the Modx when it comes to "stretching" the (single cycle, or other) sample. That's the bad news. Let me expalin:

When importing a single sample, it apparently cannot be stretched over a wide pitch range. You import, say, a one sample wav that is pitched around C3, well, whatever you try, you cannot get the pitch higher than e.g. C6.

It was already illustrated some years ago in https://www.yamahasynth.com/ask-a-quest ... in-montage .

I think it has to do with limited processor capabilities (playing a 48000 wav 3 octaves higher is 8 times the original frequency, and sadly the Modx is not performant enough to do this).

This is a serious shortcoming, as it means that there is no way to properly use a basic custom waveform for synth capabilities. I have never come across a synth that has this kind of limits. The Alesis Fusion - an old timer - for instance, had possibilities to pitch up without I have ever noticed such limits, and pitch down until zero speed (which gave a great "break" effect, for instance).

A workaround would be to use multisamples, but then you are deviating from the original idea of using a single cycle wav as an oscillator.

If you can build or export your single cycle wave forms at varying frequencies, then the issues of stretching too far go away, as you can do octave (or other divisions) of single cycle variants pitched to cover the full range you want, without needing to stretch crazy amounts, and make a "multi-sample" wave form of a single cycle as you need.

@guy, feel like I missed a trick being able to ramp all the way down to zero. That'd be fun. I use a game engine wherein I can stretch down to zero and into negatives (reverse the sample playback) and I abuse this, a lot, for slow motion and rewind visual effects.

@Andrew - thank you for finding this Italian web-site - yes - this is exactly what I needed!

@guy - I managed to load looped single-cycle waveform yesterday late at night but hit the issue you described. At some point pitch stays constant. But from this point I think I should be good. I can re-pitch all my samples to cover full keyboard range (this can be done programmatically, which will be way more fun and efficient than clicking in UI) and define a few zones.

Thank you both very much for help!