I have been making and collecting one cycle waveforms for years. They have been one of my best weapons to use when making sounds. If you have a wavetable synthesizer that can load single cycle waveforms you might find them useful as well.

These waveforms took a great amount of time to sample and I would like to continue this and similar projects, if you want to make that easier for me please please consider making a small donation.

The collections

AKWF Waveforms (a massive collection of waveforms)

AKWF NewStandards (Clean new shapes. Coming up)

AKWF Nes (Waveforms from the Nintendo 8-bit console. Coming up)

Synths that can load waveforms / oscillator shapes

Hardware

Shruthi-1, Roland MC-909, Elektron Monomachine, Elektron Octatrack

Software

I have marked the ones I like with * but I don’t know all of them…

Sytrus*, Harmless*, 3xOSC, Native Instruments Absynth, Camel Audio Alchemy, MetaSynth, Dave Smith Evolver, Symbolic Sound Kyma, Native Instruments Reaktor, Elektron Monomachine*, Ableton Simpler, Akai S2000, Animoog etc.

Single cycle waveforms!?

If you are familiar with basic subtractive synthesizers you probably know the saw, square, sinus and triangle shape that are the most common shapes a oscillator can produce pretty well. Single cycle waveforms are tiny audio files (.wave) that a synthesizer can read to use as oscillator shapes. What it means is new sounds. Some kind of grey area between sampling and synthesis. A raw waveform is very rarely what makes a whole sound but you can see it as presets for oscillators. Happy sound designing!

This kind of technique is also called PCM wavetable synthesis.