Overview
The Piston Honda Mark III is a dual wavetable oscillator from Industrial Music Electronics. Both oscillators share one set of waveform controls: three sliders labeled X, Y and Z, each with its own CV input and attenuverter. Two SELECT buttons decide which oscillator the sliders move, and the controls lock when you switch so you don’t edit the wrong one by accident. The module also has a preset manager with eight slots that can morph between presets under CV, a Link button that makes oscillator B follow A, and unison and octave options per oscillator.
Each oscillator can also run in External Input mode. Instead of the internal oscillator, an audio signal patched into the FM jack drives the wavetable, which turns it into a waveshaper. A sine in with an envelope on the gain gives the classic dynamic waveshaping sound.
The Tone menu adds different flavors of quantization noise for those who liked earlier versions of the module. The Orthodox setting plays the full 16-bit wave set without it.
Wavetables on the Piston Honda Mk III
The Piston Honda holds 512 waveforms arranged as an 8 × 8 × 8 cube, with X, Y and Z as its axes. Morphing can be switched off per axis, which gives hard steps between the eight positions instead of smooth blends, and lets you hear a single wave with nothing from its neighbors mixed in. That makes it a true 3D wavetable.
The cube comes from eight files. Each one is a mono 16-bit WAV of 32 KB: 64 waves of 256 samples. One file fills one of the eight Z positions. The rules for loading are strict. All eight files must be on the card, named 1.wav through 8.wav, in the root of a FAT-formatted SD card. You load them from the second page of the Global options menu with Load Waves from SD, the module checks each file, writes the data to memory and restarts. If a name is wrong or a file is missing, the load fails. IME suggests filling any gaps with files from its factory wave set.
WaveStack’s Piston Honda target writes the whole set at once: 1.wav to 8.wav, one per Z position, each 64 waves of 256 samples at 16 bits, replacing any files with those names. An 8 × 8 × 8 volume made with Build or Morph maps one layer per file, so the layers you see in WaveStack become the Z positions on the module. Any other table is resampled to 512 frames and split across the eight files.
One detail IME’s manual doesn’t cover is the order of X and Y inside each file. WaveStack uses WaveEdit’s row-by-row order, which is the layout the manual points to when it recommends WaveEdit. WaveStack keeps the volume’s shape in its wt3d chunk, so you can reopen and edit the cube later.
Specifications
| Waveforms | 512, as an 8 × 8 × 8 cube |
|---|---|
| Files | 8, one per Z position, all required |
| File names | 1.wav to 8.wav |
| Each file | 64 waves × 256 samples, mono, 16-bit (32 KB) |
| Card | SD card, FAT file system, files in the root directory |
| Loading | Global options menu, Load Waves from SD |
From WaveStack to the Piston Honda Mk III
- In WaveStack, build an 8 × 8 × 8 volume with Build or Morph, or start from any table you want spread across the cube.
- Open Export and pick Piston Honda Mk III as what the table is for. Export will show eight files,
1.wavto8.wav. - Save to the root of a FAT-formatted SD card, or a linked folder on the card. Any existing
1.wavto8.wavthere are replaced, so copy them somewhere first if you want to keep them. - Eject the card properly and insert it in the Piston Honda.
- Hold the encoder button and press LINK to open the Global options menu, scroll to the second page and select Load Waves from SD.
- Wait for the module to check and load all eight files. It restarts when it’s done, and the card can come out.
Frequently asked questions
Can I load fewer than eight files on the Piston Honda?
No. The manual says all eight Z slots must be written at once, and the load fails unless 1.wav through 8.wav are all on the card. If you only made a few files, IME suggests filling the rest from its factory wave set, available on its website. WaveStack sidesteps this by always writing the full set of eight, spreading your table across them when it isn’t already an 8 × 8 × 8 volume.
What format does each Piston Honda file need?
A one-channel 16-bit WAV of 32 KB: 64 waveforms of 256 samples each, 2 bytes per sample. The manual says any tool that writes WAVs aligned to the 256-sample boundary will work, and it recommends Synthesis Technology’s free WaveEdit as a first choice. So a WaveEdit bank is the right size for one file, but you need eight of them with the right names to load.
Does updating the firmware erase my waves?
Yes. IME’s manual says a firmware upgrade resets the internal waveforms to the factory set, while presets and user settings are kept. Keep the eight files you loaded, or the WaveStack project they came from, so you can reload them afterward. Firmware updates use a PICkit 3 programmer connected to a computer, not the SD card, and the manual points to IME’s product page for new versions and upgrade instructions.
How do I hear one file without blending into the next?
Turn off Z morphing in that oscillator’s options menu. Each Z position is one of the eight files, and with Z morphing on, moving the slider mixes two neighboring files. With it off, the slider steps between files and you hear only the one you’re on. The same switch exists for X and Y. When an axis has morphing off, its label on the display loses its colon.