The Wavetable Editor works really well in general, but using sliders to set values for the menu modifiers (applied offline), never feels 'right' or intuitive. Modify, for example, offers bitcrushing, AM and FM, amongst other things, while Sweep is full of totally transformative edits. The menus on the left - Sweep, Mix, Filter, Modify, Spectrum and Phase- enable numerous broad shaping operations to be performed. The main display offers three edit modes: in Waveform mode, you draw the waveform directly using a palette of graphical tools in Spectrum mode, the levels of the partials (harmonics) in the signal are adjusted and in Phase mode, you're dealing with the 'phase spectrum', which can be toyed with to apply a range of timbral shifts. A number of preset shapes are available for the whole wavetable and each of its slots, including several randomising options. The top strip shows an overview of the wavetable and its constituent wave 'slices' (between 1 and 256 of them), with the selected wave displayed in the main editor panel below.

Riding the wavesĪ click of the Edit button reveals Icarus' Wavetable Editor, in which 50 included wavetables and those resynthesised from imported samples (single-cycle or longer) can be manipulated to an extraordinary extent. The vocoder engine has 500 bands and sounds good, but we wouldn't call it a headline feature.

Next to the Resynthesis button, the Vocoder menu offers six preset vocoding setups for processing imported vocals, drums or anything else you like. Although various caveats apply (use a clean sample, preferably mono and under two seconds long), and the results never sound exactly like the imported file, the ability to stretch, repitch and 'shuttle' the sound around feel quasi-magical, and experimenting with the Morph modes on your homemade wavetables proves very productive.Īs well as the basic and looped Resynthesis styles, there's also a Granulator option (with control over grain density, pitch, position and playback speed, the last freezing the sound at the current grain), and three Time Stretch modes: Small, Medium and Large, each trading off timing accuracy against artefacts. Morphs can be rendered into wavetables, too, enabling several of them to be applied in series (albeit with only the most recent one happening in real time).īack to that sample import function, then, which is actually resynthesis rather than simple playback of audio files. Morphs include filtering, frequency modulation, amplitude modulation, harmonic and chord stacking, pulse width modulation, phase distortion and hard sync. The third oscillator menu, Morph Mode, applies one of 63 shaping processes to the wavetable playback, with the 'quality' of the morph set by the Morph knob.

Icarus vst