Hi all,
Well, it seems like there’s always plenty of posts regarding malfunction frustrations of the Virus, mostly involving its TI aspect, but I enjoy more seeing posts of the fun research discoveries that Virus users occasionally share with the forum. So, to lighten things up a little, I would like to convey some of my personal deductions of my own explorations of my favorite facet of the TI2- the wavetables. Of course, everyone has their own frame of reference as to how the Virus’s abilities should be applied, so the data presented here can be considered entirely subjective and your mileage may vary. However, I have spent quite a lot of time with this endeavor and my findings may actually have some merit to some of you after all.
I love Access’s wavetables. I also love PPG/Waldorf’s wavetables which seem to be mostly pragmatic, while Access’s seem to be more artistically oriented. Other than the enigmatic, discontinued Fizmo and Novation’s sophomoric UltraNova, these appear to be the only two sources of wavetables currently available in hardware format (the Sledge and Solaris synths' tables are licensed from Waldorf, by the way). And also by the way, I cringe when I read a synth company referring to a single-cycle spectral wave or a wave bank as a “wavetable”, i.e. Nord Wave etc.!
So, I auditioned all 99 (100 if you count the first, single sine table) of the Virus TI2 wavetables with each of the wavetable oscillator modes (with just one osc, open filter, conventional amp envelope, no effects, etc.) using the main three typical index modulation sources- lfo (for pads), envelope (for leads/solos) and keytrack (for formant voices). Good basic platforms for creating complex patches!
What I found was that the normal wavetable oscillator modulated by a triwave lfo at a nominal rate and amount was the winner in effectively utilizing the most wavetables, about 15 listed upon request, for creating nice, interesting evolving pads. Remember, this is all just my personal preferences that I’m sharing.
Conversely, I found six wavetables that were the most usable in almost any wavetable osc/ index mod configuration, those being, in order of menu appearance: Insine Out, Upsine Down, Hotch Potch, Partialism, Prismism, and Whizzfizz. The wavetable osc that could produce usable results from the most (5) of these six tables was the Simple Graintable osc with an lfo mod, Partialism being the odd man out. I’m sure all the other tables and mod sources that didn’t make my lists probably have useful purposes for other various applications, but I’m certainly not quite the master programmer yet!
So, forgive me if I’ve just been rambling on too long; I needed a good way to spend a stormy evening! Please feel free to contribute your viewpoints, opinions and findings to this subject of wavetables. We may all learn something useful about one of the TI2’s most important features!
Cheers! 
