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7. Finishing our Fathom CM wavetable patch

1 If one wavetable oscillator sounds interesting, two will definitely expand our patch’s sonic potential. Let’s go to our Audio Components and drag another Wave Table component in. We click the centre area of our first Wave Table module so that it turns red, indicating that it has been muted. Now, we select our new Wave Table component for editing.

4 We select our operator’s Index knob (the left one) for modulation, this time using an LFO as the modulation source. We crank the mod amount fully so that the LFO sweeps through the table. Let’s increase the Period of our LFO for slower motion, then modulate our operand Index (the right one) in a similar way.

7 Let’s distinguish our second Wave Table oscillator by reducing its Pitch Octave to -1.000. Lovely! For that classic wavetable synth sound, we need to add a filter to our patch. Go to the Filter category in our Audio Components, selecting the Ladder Low Pass from the Virtual Analog subcategory. We patch both Wave Table components into it.

2 We click on the Parameters button to bring up our wavetable editor, then click Wave to access the Wave Draw display. Using the techniques we discussed in our previous tutorial on the subject, we draw in a custom wave shape. We toggle the Play Waveform switch to the Raw Samples position for a more vintage tone.

5 Our new oscillator’s gain is a bit too static, so let’s back out to our Signal Flow, select our second Wave Table oscillator, then click its Oscillator button in the lower-left. Once again, we modulate it with an ADSR – this time, we go for a lengthier attack time. As before, we increase the Period.

8 Let’s assign an Easy ADSR to our filter’s Cutoff Frequency. The modulation amount should be set to around halfway, as should the filter’s Cutoff Frequency. Set up a slow Attack and Decay, low Sustain and long Release. We also increase the filter’s Resonance to around 4.8 for a bit of squelch.

3 Next, we select Wave Index 16, return to the Wave Draw display and make another waveform. Return to the Parameters page, where we use the Fill button to interpolate between our custom wave shapes. Then repeat the process for our operand wavetable, setting both Index knobs to 1 and Amount to somewhere between the two waves.

6 Let’s return to the Signal Flow. Here, we unmute our first Wave Table component so that we can hear a combination of both when we play and hold a note. It sounds pretty good, but our second Wave Table oscillator is a bit loud. We can change this by reducing the modulation amount of the ADSR we used to control its Volume parameter.

9 We’ve got time for a final touch in the form of a pair of effects. The Digital Delay LCR and Reverb Pro make a sweet combination, so we route our filter module through those processors and tweak their parameters to taste. Obviously, we could do a lot more – and we encourage you to take the patch even further on your own.