What exactly is HCM?
The technology at the heart of Gladiator 3’s oscillators, Harmonic Content Morphing (HCM) has its roots in established wavetable techniques but is rather more specific in its concept and realisation. The primary goal with HCM is the synthesis of realworld instrument sounds (guitars, trumpets, the human voice, etc), for convincing emulation and – more importantly – as the basis for entirely new tones.
Unlike the single-cycle waveforms loaded into a regular wavetable oscillator, an HCM ‘morph-table’ captures a series of 256 tiny, smoothly interpolated snapshots, each comprising 512 harmonics that are FFT transformed and ‘sequenced’ to recreate the resampled source material as it changes over time. A morph-table is loaded and pitched just like any other oscillator waveform, but – crucially – the movement of the ‘playhead’ through the snapshots upon triggering can be manipulated, looped and sped up/slowed down, and its harmonic shaping can be altered via the Morph Mode options and spectral Modifiers, as discussed in the main text.
There’s a huge library of HCM morph-tables included with Gladiator 3, and three add-on Expansion packs available should you want more.