I. Tutorial: Modifying a Hyper-Wave Voice

Here’s a tutorial that takes you through all the basic steps involved in modifying an existing Hyper-Wave voice.

1. Begin by pressing the Sounds button. Call up the GENESIS factory sound from bank R4-9 by pressing its soft button—the name will be underlined:

   

   Remember that the TS‑10/TS‑12 utilizes a special area of memory called an edit buffer in which your edits are temporarily stored. This ensures that no data is lost or overwritten until you specifically Write it to memory, so you can safely follow the editing procedure in this Tutorial without any fear of permanently altering this factory sound.

2. Play a few notes on the keyboard while listening carefully. What you will hear is a combination of a drone playing over a repetitive percussive pattern. To start our “dissection” of this program, press the Select Voice button. Here’s what you’ll see:

   

We’ll begin by listening to the individual contribution of each voice to the overall program. Solo each of the four voices in turn (by double-clicking the soft button above or below each) and play a few notes as you do so. (Note that some Voices only play in specific keyboard zones, so try both high and low notes. Some voices emerge only after a key is held down for a few seconds.)

Voice 1 is clearly responsible for the percussive pattern, while the other three voices combine to form the drone sound. In this Tutorial, we’ll edit Voice 1 (the only Hyper-Wave voice in this program) in order to remove the percussive pattern and substitute instead another complementary drone voice.

By double-clicking the soft button above WAVE-LIST, it soloes the voice. Parentheses appear around the other voices, indicating that they are muted.



3. Press one of the soft buttons below EDIT WAVE-LIST to open the Wave List editor. Here’s what you’ll see:

   

   By increasing the STEP value with the Data Slider or the Up Arrow key, you can see a variety of percussion instruments that make up the complex sound of the wave-list. However, if you hold down a key and listen carefully, the instruments are not simply playing in a sequence; there is no immediately obvious looping. This is because the wave-list is being sequenced through the TRAVELER MOD-DESTINATION, which is altering the order of the wave-list steps.

4. Press the Wave button twice to reveal the second Wave sub-page:

   

   By setting the MOD-DESTINATION to TRAVELER, the playback order of the waves in the Wave-list is determined by the modulation source, in this case the LFO.

5. Changing the nature of the LFO's waveshape will change the ordering of the wave-list playback. Press the LFO button twice to reveal the second LFO sub-page.

   

   A POS/SINE waveshape is selected; in combination with the TRAVELER MOD-DESTINATION, this means that various steps within the wave-list are being played under the direct control of the rising and falling sine wave (as opposed to the wave-list playing through its steps in order).

   Changing the shape to SQUARE will result in only two of the 16 waves in the list playing back, because a square wave only alternates between two values.

6. Let’s remove this modulation so we can hear the wave-list cycle through in order. To do so, return to the Wave Modulation sub-page by pressing the Wave button twice, and change the MOD-DESTINATION to *--NONE--*. Play a note on the keyboard—you’ll now clearly be able to hear the sixteen wave-step pattern, repeating in a continuous loop.

7. Press the Select Voice button again in order to return to the Select Voice page, and then press either soft button under the EDIT WAVE-LIST option in order to enter the Wave List editor. If you go through each of the sixteen wave steps (with the use of the STEP parameter), you’ll see that waves from the Percussion group are currently assigned to all steps. Let’s change these so that, instead of hearing a distinct series of percussive sounds, we instead create a single complex sound that contains subtle timbral shifts. Accordingly, select the following internal ROM waves for each of the sixteen wave steps:

   Step	Wave Name	Wave Class
   01	CHIFFLUTE	WIND+REEDS
   02	ORG-WAVE3	WAVEFORM
   03	PAD-WAVE4	WAVEFORM
   04	PAD-WAVE5	WAVEFORM
   05	PAD-WAVE6	WAVEFORM
   06	SYNKEY-WV	WAVEFORM
   07	CLARINET	WIND+REEDS
   08	OBOE	WIND+REEDS
   09	ANA-WAVE4	WAVEFORM
   10	ANA-WAVE3	WAVEFORM
   11	ANA-WAVE2	WAVEFORM
   12	SYNTHBELL	INHARMONIC
   13	SINE-WAVE	WAVEFORM
   14	ORG-WAVE2	WAVEFORM
   15	ORG-WAVE5	WAVEFORM
   16	BEL-WAVE3	WAVEFORM
   17	BEL-WAVE4	WAVEFORM

8. Play a note on the keyboard—instead of the sixteen percussive sounds, you’ll now hear a continuous sound containing distinct timbral and (in the case of a few of the wave steps) pitch change. Before we get to the task of blending these changes together into one cohesive sound, we need to make a couple of other minor “tweaks” to this factory voice. First of all, you’ll find that the voice doesn’t change pitch as you play different notes on the keyboard. This is not because of any of the wave-list settings—in fact, all sixteen wave steps have their PITCH-KBD-TRK parameter set to ON.

   The explanation instead lies in the fact that this voice has not been assigned to the system pitch-table. Press the Pitch Mods button and locate the PITCHTBL parameter (in the lower left-hand corner). This is currently set to ALL-C4 (in other words, all notes played on the keyboard sound the C4 pitch instead of following the “normal” default system pitch-table). Change this parameter to SYSTEM, and you’ll find that the sound now changes pitch as you play different notes on the keyboard.

   

9. Secondly, this sound currently only plays monophonically. This is because of the Glide Mode that was selected when the voice was originally programmed. To change this and allow the voice to play polyphonically, press the Pitch button and change the GLIDEMODE parameter from MINIMODE to NONE:

   

10. Third, the initial attack of the first wave step is not clearly audible. We specifically chose the CHIFFLUTE wave (from the WIND+REEDS wave class) as the starting step because it produces a characteristic attack that will give a great deal of character to the complex sound we’re trying to create. In this particular case, the reason why the beginning of this wave is cut off has nothing to do with any wave-list settings (the START time of wave step 01 is at 00 and the DELAY time of the overall wave-list is at 0000). Instead, the explanation lies in the action of Envelope 2, which, in this particular sound, is modulating the cutoff frequency of Filter 1 (as you will see if you press the Filters button). To change this, press the Envelope 2 button and alter the Attack time to a new value of 12, as shown below:

    

11. Play a few notes on the keyboard and listen carefully—we’re getting there, but each of the sixteen wave steps still sounds quite distinct, instead of blending into the one cohesive sound we’re trying to attain. This is where the Hyper-Wave XFADE and DEPTH parameters come into play. Press the Select Voice button once again, and then press either soft button under the EDIT WAVE-LIST option in order to enter the Wave List Editor. Then press the soft button under the *TIME* parameter (lower center) in order to enter the Time sub-page:

    

    If you use the STEP parameter to view all sixteen wave steps, you’ll find they all currently have a duration (DUR) of 192 (00192) msec, but with a crossfade time (XFADE-TIME) of 00000—in other words, there are no crossfades in use at all. Change this so that all sixteen steps utilize a crossfade time of 192 (00192), with a depth of 2 DB. This way, each wave step will seamlessly blend into the next one over its full duration. Play a note, and then a chord, on the keyboard. Quite a change!

12. Finally, let’s hear our newly created voice along with the other three voices in the program. Press the Select Voice button and unmute all voices by pressing the soft button above or below each of them twice (the asterisks around the first voice and the parentheses around the other three voices will disappear). Again, play a note, and then a chord on the keyboard. In place of the percussion pattern, you’ll now hear a complex, slowly changing sound (it takes over 3 seconds to get through all sixteen 192-msec steps) that works well with the other three drone voices in the program. Don’t forget to press the Write button and rename and save your work!

If you’d like to further “tweak” this edited Hyper-Wave voice, here are a few suggestions:

• Substitute different waves for any or all of the sixteen wave steps.
• Change the direction (DIR) of any or all of the sixteen wave steps to REVERSE (this will have virtually no effect on Waveform or Inharmonic class waves).
• Adjust the volume (VOL) parameter of any or all of the wave steps in order to create dynamic change. Another way to accomplish this is to alter the levels and/or rates of Envelope 3.
• Make the timbral change more rapid or more slow by either decreasing or increasing the DUR value of each step. To preserve the smoothness of the blend, don’t forget to also change the XFADE times to the same value.
• Instead of a steady timbral change, make it more irregular by entering different DUR and XFADE values for each wave step.
• Add a “quasi-random” timbral change by restoring the MOD-DESTINATION back to its original TRAVELER value and then change the MODSRC to NOISE.
• Add pitch change in addition to the timbral change by adjusting the Transpose (XPOS) and/or DETUNE parameters of any or all of the wave steps.
• Add filtering effects by altering the Filter 1 and/or Filter 2 settings.
• Change the effects routings and/or algorithm.

The key is experimentation! Don’t be afraid to dig deeply into the programming power of the TS‑10/TS‑12—the rewards will be new and exciting sounds that will add freshness and originality to your performance.