Sounds exiting Christian!
The WT VCO I hear most people rave about is the Qu-Bit Chord. I don’t think it’s because of its raw sound quality but because it can make beautiful chords with wavetables, so that might be a feature worth considering.
In VCV Rack we have a cadillac of a WT VCO, the Blamsoft Wave, which is just gorgeous. So probably not so much point in straight up duplicating its functionality.
When I recently built my first Eurorack system I got the Erica Synths Graphic VCO, which is a WT VCO. It looks great on paper but I’m not so sure it delivers on it. Thing about WT’s is that it’s incredibly easy to make it scream and howl in 722 different ways, which is rarely useful. So to me, it’s good if a lot of work goes into making the subtle sounds and changes work well. Also, being able to upload your own wavetables, made with e.g. the Waveedit program from Andrew Belt would be incredibly useful. But a nice bank of carefully chosen presets is also very useful.
Hands-on harmonics control via a knob or two sounds like a very interesting and useful feature, as does the sample control. Off the top of my head, if I were to specify features for an interesting WT VCO it would be something like this:
- A modest size bank of preset/inbuilt wavetables, carefully chosen for musical relevance, with a range from the soft, subtle and gentle, to the harsh and screaming.
- The ability to upload/add user supplied wavetables made with Waveedit, 8 tables should do it.
- Being able to play chords, with at least a mix/unified output. Look at the Qu-Bit Chord. Very attractive feature. Of course in VCV Rack we almost get that for free, with the polyphonic cables and the various chord modules, so maybe simply making it polyphonic will do it.
- The ability to both morph smoothely between waves but also to change between them discretely.
- A sub-oscillator output, selectable 1 or 2 octaves below would be useful. It’s just a copy of the main waveform.
- The ability for very simple modification of a waveform in the module might be very interesting. I’m think of a knob to choose the placement, and then a knob to choose the level of inserting quite simple sinusoidal “bumps” in the current waveform.
- If you can hack it, a simple harmonics knob to dial harmonics up/down would be very interesting.
- Leave effects and filters to external modules. I think it’s perfectly valid to advertise that “this module should definately be coupled with a good LP filter after it”.
- Again, I don’t think you should simply copy the Blamsoft Wave. Instead, come up with simple controls that offer very musically relevant control over the tone and timbre of the result. That’s where the gold is, IMHO.
It’s fine if it’s a bit large, the important thing is sound quality, that’s what will keep me coming back to it. If it’s a screaming, aliasing mess I don’t think I’ll be very interested.