Reference Manual

409 Live Instrument Reference
User Waveforms
The “User“ entry in the Wave chooser allows you to create your own waveforms by drawing the
amplitudes of the oscillator’s harmonics. You can also select one of the built-in waveforms and
then edit it in the same way. The small display next to the Wave chooser gives a realtime over-
view of your waveform.
When your mouse is over the Oscillator display area, the cursor will change to a pencil. Draw-
ing in the display area then raises or lowers the amplitudes of the harmonics. As you adjust the
amplitudes, the Status Bar will show the number of the harmonic you’re adjusting as well as its
amplitude. Holding [Shift] and dragging will constrain horizontal mouse movement, allowing
you to adjust the amplitude of only one harmonic at a time.
You can switch between editing the first 16, 32 or 64 harmonics via the switches to the right of
the display. Higher harmonics can be generated by repeating the drawn partials with a gradual
fadeout, based on the settings in the Repeat chooser. Low Repeat values result in a brighter
sound, while higher values result in more high-end roll-off and a more prominent fundamental.
With Repeat off, partials above the 16th, 32nd or 64th harmonic are truncated.
The [right-click](PC) / [CTRL-click](Mac) context menu on the harmonics display offers options
for editing only the even or odd harmonics. This is set to “All“ by default. The context menu also
offers an option to toggle Normalize on or off. When enabled, the oscillator’s overall output
level is maintained as you draw additional harmonics. When disabled, additional harmonics
add additional level. Note that the volume can become extremely loud if Normalize is off.
You can export your waveform in .ams format to the Samples/Waveforms folder in your User
Library via an option in the [right-click](PC) / [CTRL-click](Mac) context menu. Ams files can be
imported back into Operator by dragging them from the browser onto one of the oscillator’s
display areas. Ams files can also be loaded into Simpler or Sampler.
Hint: Both the built-in and user waveforms can be copied and pasted from one oscillator to an-
other using the [right-click](PC) / [CTRL-click](Mac) context menu.
More Oscillator Parameters
The frequency of an oscillator can be adjusted in the shell with its Coarse and Fine controls. An
oscillator’s frequency usually follows that of played notes, but for some sounds it might be useful
to set one or more oscillators to fixed frequencies. This can be done for each individual oscilla-
tor by activating the Fixed option. This allows the creation of sounds in which only the timbre will
vary when different notes are played, but the tuning will stay the same. Fixed Mode would be