Three oscillators, a three-axis wavetable, and eighteen filters

A Wavetable With Three Axes

Every oscillator can be a wavetable oscillator. There are 27 tables, and each one morphs across eight frames — but morph is only the first axis. A second, warp, reshapes the wave again on top of it: sync, phase bend, ring, folding, formant shift, saturation, quantization and more, eleven in all. You are moving over a surface rather than down a list, which is what the display in the WT panel is showing you.

Both are independent and both are modulation destinations, so an envelope can walk the morph while an LFO works the warp.

The third axis is one you never touch: pitch. Every frame, at every warp amount, is stored as a ladder of band-limited versions — three per octave — and the note you play decides which rung is read. That ladder is the reason everything else stays clean, and it is what the next section is really about.

Folding That Does Not Alias

Wavefolding generates harmonics far above the ones you started with, which is exactly the thing that aliases when you do it live. The usual answer is to accept the aliasing or to precompute the wave — and a precomputed wave cannot follow a knob.

Voltaic does neither. Each warp is baked at four amounts, and each of those is band-limited down the pitch axis at build time; the runtime interpolates between them. Because the folding happens before the band-limiting rather than after it, the table handed to the oscillator never contains a harmonic above Nyquist to begin with — there is nothing to fold back. The result is alias-free at any pitch and still moves under an envelope, an LFO, aftertouch or the mod wheel, which is normally a choice between two things.

Three warps that live on broadband grit — bit reduction, sample-rate decimation and hard drive — are deliberately left as runtime shapers instead, because band-limiting removes the very thing that makes them sound like themselves.

Modal Resonators, Twice

A bank of tuned resonators can be an oscillator here — pick MODAL as the wave and choose a body: deep, string, tine, wood, bell or glass, with decay, brightness, mallet hardness and strike position over the top. It is struck rather than played, so it gives you the percussive and plucked material that subtractive synthesis is worst at.

The same bank is also available as a filter, so you can run any other oscillator, or the noise source, through a resonant body instead of a curve.

Eighteen Filters

The textbook set first: 2- and 4-pole lowpass, 2- and 4-pole bandpass, 2- and 4-pole highpass, and a notch. Then three modelled circuits, each in lowpass, bandpass and highpass form — a Moog-style transistor ladder, an Oberheim-style SEM state-variable with its own notch, and a 303. The modal bank makes the eighteenth.

Cutoff and resonance each take their own envelope, and both are LFO destinations.

Three Oscillators, And What They Do To Each Other

All three take any of the wave types, so nothing is reserved for the sub. Each one also stacks: up to seven detuned voices per oscillator, with detune and blend of their own, which is twenty-one voices a note if you ask all three for it. Detune is a modulation destination; voice count deliberately is not, because changing it mid-note reseeds the phases and clicks.

The third oscillator additionally feeds the other two. Normal, ring modulation, AM and phase modulation are four independent switches rather than one selector, so they mix — you can ring-modulate and phase-modulate from the same source at once, each with its own depth. The phase modulation is through-zero, so negative modulation reverses the carrier rather than folding at zero.

Modulation

Four envelopes and two LFOs, with sixteen destinations to aim them at — pitch, cutoff, amplitude, resonance, and the pulse width, wavetable morph, warp and unison spread of each oscillator individually.

Morph and warp do not take a fixed modulation range. Each has an A and a B knob, and modulation travels from one to the other; set B below A and the parameter falls as the envelope rises.

Velocity, aftertouch and the mod wheel each get their own routing page. Aftertouch alone reaches cutoff, amplitude, resonance, vibrato, LFO rate and depth, morph, warp, unison spread, and the decay of the modal bank — leaning on a key damps a struck resonator the way a hand on a string does. All of it is polyphonic, so it is per note rather than per keyboard.

Arpeggiator, Sequencer And Effects

An arpeggiator and a step sequencer share the same page, with per-step editing, swing, a time division and range, and the option to run from host tempo instead of their own clock.

After the filter come a phaser, a delay and a reverb — enough to finish a sound without leaving the app, which matters more on a phone than it does in a studio.