Howard - Any Chance of a Few "Waldorf Clowns?"

[Vectorman]

You know, it's going to make me sound rather flighty in the face of my initial enthusiasm, but I've sent the Q back and have a Virus TI Snow arriving tomorrow instead (the Blofeld I may hang onto for a bit so I can experiment with it more before I decide whether to keep it). After taking the time to listen to a ton of TI demos all over the net and seeing how much further along it is in regard to computer integration, I think I'm ultimately going to find the Virus more practically useful and convenient to deal with. The Blo and Q's polyphony also dries up way too fast with complex patches (I sometimes found myself down to 3 or 4 note polyphony). The Q's vocoder, which I'd thought would come in handy for live gigs, also isn't that great.

There were a handful of patches in both Waldorfs that pushed my buttons at first listen, and I think part of the excitement was the nostalgia factor of being able to say I had the "PPG sound" (or rather the modern equivlanet, without paying a ridiculous sum for a bug-ridden Wave 2.2 or 2.3). The problem is, once I stopped playing with the Waldorfs in isolation and started working on a song, I found that side-by-side, I preferred the "core" sound of Zebra and the (software) Korg Wavestation on the whole.

75% of the Blofeld's factory patches, to me, are rather bland and repetitious. I don't have nearly the range of really good patches to use as jumping-off points as I do with Zebra. I feel like I'd have to devour weeks re-inventing the wheel to program a better variety of Blofeld sounds. Waldorf should have had some sound designers come up with banks of completely NEW sounds that showed off the instrument, rather than just porting over a bunch of Micro-Q sounds that don't even exploit the new features.

Attempting to emulate some things that I did like in the Waldorfs finally prompted me to spend more time programming Zebra...and I found that, starting with things like suthnear's wavetable transfers or some of Howard's wavetable sets from "Science" in Zebra oscillators, it's actually easier for me to get wavetable sounds that I like in Zebra than it is in the Waldorfs.

As I was going through the process of comparisons, I also found that some of the waveforms in the Korg Wavestation can produce very PPG-esque sounds, but the Wavestation sounds more smooth and "hi-fi" and not as gritty as the PPG/Blofeld (which can either be a good or a bad thing, depending on what one prefers). With Korg's wave sequences, I also find it more simple and direct to define exactly the sequence of waveform transitions I want than having to modulate a factory-chosen wavetable with an envelope or LFO and "guess" as to where a given modulation value will move you in the table. Being able to just enter a list of waveforms along with their levels, time values and crossfade amounts offers a more direct and surgically precise way of getting exactly what you want with wavetable sweeps. Korg had a good idea there, IMO.

I'm not giving up on the Blo necessarily, but in a lot of ways it feels "half-finished." At least the Virus is more fully developed and has a huge pool of patches to start from. I think Zebra, the Wavestation, and (hopefully) the Virus will be my main workhorses, and the Blo is something I can continue to mess with on the side to see if I can get a wide enough variety of useful things out of it to justify keeping it around.

Like I said at the start, I don't mean to seem capricious. I guess it's only human nature that we're excited over something new when we first get it, but over time, the cream rises (so to speak), and the initial gloss fades from some things for us while other instruments "stick" and become things we use every day. I have at least a dozen softsynths installed right now, all of which I thought would be fantastic when I bought them, but Zebra and the Wavestation are the only ones that get used on almost everything I do.

[beej]

I've never owned one, but generally I get the impression that *all* of Waldorf's synths were half-finished...

[suthnear]

Nah - while they might have a few bugs, I don't think any of their synths could be said to be in a truly incomplete state. Nevertheless, there's definitely a an air of chaos around the company. It's probably why I like them...