![]() ![]() Microwaves have been used by Nine Inch Nails, Hardfloor, Jimmy Edgar, Vangelis, and Crystal Distortion. The mkII did offer improved features in terms of effects and processing, however it was a fully digital DSP-driven machine and thus, lacked the warmth and character of the original Microwave. ![]() However, the success the Microwave found among "every-day" musicians was not lost on Waldorf, leading them to release the much more common yet inferior Microwave II in 1997. Designed for the high-end synth market, the Wave represented the pinnacle of Waldorf and PPG's wavetable synth technology in its time. The final OS was version 2.0, released in 1994.Ī few years after the Microwave's introduction, a fully realized knob-laden hands-on version of the sort of wavetable technology used here came in the form of the Waldorf Wave. These added additional wavetables, the options to create custom wavetables, a speech synthesizer, and numerous other improvements. Over the years, the operating system (OS) could be upgraded via EPROM chips from Waldorf. Its Nave-inspired engine features all the classic wavetables 80 of them plus 10 user tables and 50 Text-To-Speech wavetables to satisfy any robotic cravings you may have. There are 64 on-board memory patches, plus another 64 via external memory card. I can’t deny being a long-time fan of the Waldorf sound and of wavetable synthesis in general, so I was pretty keen to try out the NW1. Polyphony is slim but decent at 8-voices. With only a handful of on-board buttons and one parameter adjustment knob, editing sounds was quite cumbersome and usually required some sort of external editor to really dig into the power on-hand. Unfortunately, Waldorf streamlined its design a little too far. It's a powerful instrument in a small and unassuming package. To lower production costs and simultaneously attempt to make it more accessible to more musicians, the Microwave was packaged in a two-unit rack module. In fact, the Microwave uses the same wavetables from the PPG Wave 2.3! In effect, the Microwave sounds like the PPG, which in turn, sounds like synth-pioneers Tangerine Dream. A digital/analog hybrid in which digitally sampled wavetables are processed through analog VCA envelope and VCF (filter) sections producing a classic and warm yet highly complex sound. The Microwave was built upon what was the PPG Wave. Towards the end of the 1980's, PPG's technology and several of their employees joined Waldorf, another German manufacturer, and the first product to come out of this collaboration was the Microwave, released in 1989. But like most vintage synth makers, the company was fading. The wavetable names were added into the full sized pics by Bodo Koktanek.Looking back at the 1980's, one standout German synthesizer manufacturer was undoubtedly PPG (Palm Products GmbH), fueled by the technology in its wavetable based synthesizer, the Wave 2.x series. The area is getting higher and darker on stronger frequency bands. The frequency axis (x) is linear scaled as on most FFT charts and starts at 88 Hz and goes up to a little bit more than 22 kHz. The other Waldorf wavetable synths as microwave, microwave2, XT and XTK would have shown the same results. These wavetable are not implemented on the Waldorf synths (except for the PPG wave 2.V VST Plug-In). #31 Was some kind of a sample wavetable (including a sax and a piano). You can also set this up in the modulation matrix. ![]() You can automate this by specifying PWM source then adjust the amount of modulation with PWM amount. PPG wavetable #30 were a special one called "Upper Wavetable". Parameter Pulswidth to set the starting point or manually sweep the table. Wavetables 01 to 30 are the original ones of the PPG waves. I sampled the wavetables of the WAVE and did a FFT to show the harmonic content. The unofficial Waldorf WAVE pages Wavetables ![]()
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