KRC Mathwaves: Wavetables for Korg modwave, Serum, Vital, Surge, Bitwig and other wavetable synths plus single-cycle waveforms

An Insanely Massive Collection of Wavetables

KRC Mathwaves is a massive (some might say obsessive) collection of 36,000 80,000 120,000+ wavetables — and their original component 29,000+ single-cycle waveforms — for the Korg modwave hardware synth, Korg modwave native, Serum, Surge XT, Bitwig (Polymer synth), and other wavetable synthesizers—such as Arturia Pigments, Vital, Phase Plant, Ableton Wavetable, and others—that can import .wav files as wavetables. If you're interested in trying the sampler/free version, you can find that here, Free Wavetables for modwave, Serum, and other wavetable synths.

Learn more about this collection in my YouTube KRC Mathwaves playlist... and like and subscribe while you're there!

Yes, this insane collection continues to expand. Now at more than 120,000 wavetables and counting. (More to come!) Surely the best value in terms of wavetable collections for the discriminating synthesis. But I'm biased...

Explore New Dimensions in Sound, Music, and Tone

The KRC Mathwaves waveforms and wavetables offer a wide variety of digital and analog type tones, including complex timbres that are great for processing through modwave's virtual analog filters or the creative filter types provided in Serum, Vital and other synths. And the bell-like tones of polygonal series and similar waveforms respond beautifully to reverb and chorus effects. This collection is an indispensable production tool designed for wavetable synth freaks (like me!).

Wavetables and Single-Cycle Waveforms Made from Math

Created using mathematical techniques built on ideas developed by previous waveform explorers, KRC Mathwaves started as a deep exploration of the unique timbral qualities of waveforms based on the polygonal number series but explores other novel waveform creation techniques as well—including bitmasking, frequency shift keying, fractal and wavelet approaches, AM FM and ring modulation, and other numeric, harmonic, and geometry series concepts.

Give new life to your productions with this insane, wildly creative collection of wavetable synth sources.

The collected waveforms result from pure mathematical generation of waveform functions, not based on sampled recordings. The resulting collection is weighted toward bell-like tones, but many other vocal, harsh, drone, and bread-and-butter synthesis timbres can also be found within.

The wavetables themselves are constructed in various ways, with an eye toward exploration and happy accidents. They are also optimized for Korg modwave and similar synths, with no more than 64 frames per wavetable, leaving plenty of room to modulate wavetable position and discover sweet spots between interesting waveforms. And because they've been constructed in this way, there's no decimation of the original wavetable.

Wavetables for Korg modwave and modwave native, and the newly-announced Korg multi/poly synth

Wavetables are provided as ready-to-load Korg .mwbundle files that can be sent directly to your hardware modwave via the modwave Editor/Librarian and/or loaded into the modwave native software. (And all 36,000 can be loaded to your modwave hardware at once!) This version should also work with the new Korg multi/poly synthesizer since it uses the same wavetable format as modwave.

Wavetables for Serum

For Xfer Serum users, a folder hierarchy of wavetables can simply be dropped into the Tables subdirectory of the Serum Presets folder for instant gratification. These same 32-bit .wav files can also be imported into a wide variety of other synths and plugins—any wavetable synth that accepts 32-bit wavetable with 2048-sample length frames.

Wavetables for Surge XT, Bitwig Polymer, and other ".wt" Format Synths

For users of Surge XT and Bitwig's Polymer synth, a folder hierarchy of wavetables is provided in the Surge ".wt" format. These are 32-bit floating-point .wt files with up to 64 frames each. In Bitwig, these can easily be imported into Polymer by right-clicking in the Polymer interface until you see "Import Wavetables". Then select that option and navigate to a folder of .wt files you'd like to import (you won't see the individual filenames).

Wavetables in WaveEdit Format for Eurorack Modules, Etc.

For users of Eurorack wavetable oscillator modules like the Qu-Bit Electronix Chord V2, Synthesis Technology E370 and E352, and others that support wavetable import via .wav files exported from WaveEdit, the wavetables are also provided in WaveEdit format. These are 16-bit .wav files composed of 64 frames that are 256 samples long.

Wavetables for Kilohearts Phase Plant

For users of Phase Plant, a huge number of the KRC Mathwaves wavetables are provided as .flac (Free Lossless Audio Codec) files. The Phase Plant wavetable format is a little different than the more common "Serum-style" wavetable. Phase Plant wavetables must be 256 frames in length and each frame is 2048 samples in length. This makes for quite large wavetables, so the ability to store them as .flac (instead of uncompressed .wav format) is somewhat helpful. Once extracted, the various folders of these .flac format wavetables can be copied or moved to your Phase Plant "User Waveforms" directory and then accessed in the synth's Wavetable oscillator.

Conversion of the complete KRC Mathwaves collection to Phase Plant format is an ongoing project, but this collection currently stands at around 100,000 of the most interesting wavetables. (All of the core wavetable collections and the most advanced VAE model wavetables have been converted. The earlier VAE wavetables are still to come.)

Single-Cycle Multisamples and Wav Files

The 29,160 single-cycle waveforms used in the KRC Mathwaves wavetables are also provided in a variety of formats:

Multisamples for Korg wavestate and wavestate native

Each single-cycle waveforms from the Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 collection, has been resampled and converted to Korg multisample files, resampled to span the entire C0 to C9 range, suitable for use in the Korg wavestate hardware and Korg wavestate native software synths via Korg Sample Builder. (They can also be used in modwave in this way, but why bother since they are also available more usefully as wavetables! 🤔)

"Format-independent" Multisamples

All 29,160 core single-cycle waveforms in a directory format suitable for use with the "Convert with Moss" utility, allowing them to easily be converted to other multisample formats such as Akai (MPC) Keygroups, Kontakt files, or other formats. Desire another format? Contact me with details (keith@synth.biz).

Single-cycle .wav with Full-length Loops

The raw waveforms as 2048-sample .wav files (some 16-bit, some 32-bit) with an arbitrary 44.1 kHz sample rate and full-length sample loop points set. Need a different format? Contact me with details (keith@synth.biz).

Designed for Exploration and Happy Accidents

How do you deal with nearly 30,000 waveforms? Embrace a little randomness. The various "Explore" groupings allow for easy, semi-random browsing of the library's massive amount of content. Several groupings-the "RAIM" and "Mband" collections-use special techniques to create wavetables with different results than you'd get from pure linear interpolation between waveforms:

Mband (Multiband Interpolation) Wavetables

First, two waveforms were selected at random from the collection (either "Vol. 1" or "Vol. 2" as implied in the names). These define the start and end points of the wavetable. Then, the harmonics are considered as 4 bands (think of it as low, low-mid, high-mid, and high), and one of these bands was selected randomly to crossfade linearly (1:1) across the entire wavetable. The remaining bands are randomly assigned a different morph slope (between 0.5 and 1.0) and so may transition from the start to end somewhat faster than the linear band. This creates a bit of timbral variety, though the effect is subtle.

Then, based on this rule, we generate 6 evenly-spaced interstitial frames, and the final wavetables contain 8 frames. In modwave or Serum (or whatever wavetable synth) with interpolation turned on, you then hear the wavetable smoothly morph between these frames.

RAIM (Random Adaptive Interpolated Magnitude) Wavetables

The wavetables labeled "RAIM" are similar in that they again start with a beginning and ending waveform, and 5 interstitial frames are generated to give a slightly different result than pure linear crossfading. The RAIM technique works as follows:

The harmonics of the start and end waveforms are ever-so-slightly perturbed using a Gaussian distribution (so it's quite subtle), and then morph targets are generated by interpolating the harmonics between the spectral magnitude of the two waveforms. But what about the phase of the morph targets? This is where we get to the "Adaptive" part (it refers to "Adaptive Phase Selection"). For each morph target, we generate two candidate waveforms, one with the phase of the "start" waveform and one with the phase of the "end" waveform, and then select the one with the least DC offset. So, theoretically, there are fewer phase shift artifacts within the wavetable, but really it's just an experiment in getting slightly different transitions than you'd get if you just had a two-frame wavetable! They sound quite cool.

VAE (Variational Autoencoder) Wavetables

Based on my mathematical explorations of single-cycle waveforms and wavetables, I created an AI (well, multiple AIs really) that generate(s) novel wavetables. You get another 10,000+ VAE (variational autoencoder) wavetables of different types. What, what!?

NEW!: Based on my continuing variational autoencoder experiments, I just dropped [11/28/2023] an additional 35,000+ wavetables created using new versions of my evolving wavetable AI experiments. Yeah, the full collection is now more than 80,000 wavetables. Am I insane? Don't answer that. But wait... there's more...

NEWER!: An additional 47,000+ wavetables created with the latest versions of my AI VAE models [added 12/27/23]. And, yes, this brings the full collection to more that 120,000 wavetables and I'm simply going to stop counting now.

Basic Morph Wavetables

Some folks just want something a bit more pedestrian... So I went back to the basics and morphed a selection of the original KRC Mathwaves mathematical waveforms with the standard sine, triangle, sawtooth, and square waves to create a set of 2048 lean and mean wavetables (3 frames each) that are a bit less "unusual" and "out there". Of course, the classic KRC Mathwaves flavor is still there, but you might find these useful as substitutes for your bog-standard "basic synth" wavetables. Each wavetable features a standard synthesis waveform spectrally morphed with a Mathwaves waveform, with a 50% spectral morph right in the middle of the wavetable.

Splice Wavetables

Back to the original Mathwaves concept, I developed a time-domain splicing technique to combine original Mathwaves waveforms with each other to create new, novel timbres. The result is an additional 4000+ wavetables that splice two sets of 2 different waveforms together and then spectrally morph between them at the halfway point.

The wavetable insanity continues... Get KRC Mathwaves now, and you won't miss future updates to this ever-growing, massive collection of wavetables for Korg modwave, Xfer Serum, Vital, and other wavetable synthesizers.

FFT and Random Phase Wavetables

Continuing on from the "splice" concept, you'll also find more than 20,000 wavetables constructed from frequency-domain splicing, convolution, and other manipulations of the original KRC Mathwaves waveforms.

Mathwaves Vol 4, Shark, Morlet, and Bezier Wavetables

KRC Mathwaves volume 4 tackles basic saw and square-based wavetables and variations on the triangle waveform, resulting in 23 "basic synthesis" wavetables. Additionally, this collection contains 1024 "Shark" or sharkfin wavetables, which combine properties of the pulse, square, saw, and triangle waveforms. There are also 40 wavetables exploring the unique characteristics of the "Morlet wavelet" and a whopping 6000+ wavetables generated by morphing a variety of Bezier curves, inspired by the spline/curve morphing approach of synths like Zebralette 3.

Formant Wavetables

A set of 5000+ new wavetables created by applying vocal/vowel/formant filtering to a variety of carriers, including the sawtooth wave, square wave, white noise, and gaussian noise. These are potentially useful for dubstep "growl" sounds, hypergrowls, and various other genres like "color bass", with appropriate effects settings. They're also great as a substitute for the boring old saw or square waves.

An Ever-growing Collection of Wavetables

The wavetable insanity continues... Get KRC Mathwaves now, and you won't miss future updates to this ever-growing, massive collection of wavetables for Korg modwave, Xfer Serum, Vital, and other wavetable synthesizers.