Waldorf MicroWave as a plugin?

[snigelx]

Alpha knob available for DAW automation. Check

[MartyK]

I am a sound lover and just so happened to hear it mainly by chance. Mostly I don't bother but for some reason I disliked it quite a bit this time. It's 2024 and this is not good by 2024 standards.

What is good or better by 2024 standards? And why?

[Artie Fichelle]

The synth is the same
in a relative way,
but your older.

[snigelx]

Big fan of being able to dial in and choose from all the Factory ROM waves (https://www.carbon111.com/300waves.pdf), plus if one is feeling adventurous you could toss in a random User wave or two. I just like having access to individual ROM waves from the original tables. The editor is an awesome addition to this instrument.

[suthnear]

The synth is the same
in a relative way,
but your older.

[Synthman2000]

I am a sound lover and just so happened to hear it mainly by chance. Mostly I don't bother but for some reason I disliked it quite a bit this time. It's 2024 and this is not good by 2024 standards.

What is good or better by 2024 standards? And why?

Serum, Massive X, maybe Dune 3 and Zebra 2.x and many other of the complex powerfully featured synths that are like a workstation in themselves with multiple synthesis types and many more abilities, including effects if you want to use them.

Soon this synth will be the same price as those €149

Because they are not 8bit synths that sound old. Unless you are making something sound old intentionally you will be missing many contemporary sounds and synthesis abilities.

And as mentioned you could program or process to make many synths of the last decade sound rather like this one.

If you need this specific synth, are into nostalgia, love everything Waldorf, then you can buy and enjoy it. It all depends what you are doing.

The days of paying that price for a soft synth for myself are well and truly over. I can only speak for myself though. The market is beyond saturated.

And none of it makes your music better written or arguably sound better.

[Synthman2000]

What is good or better by 2024 standards? And why?

Serum, Massive X, maybe Dune 3 and Zebra 2.x and many other of the complex powerfully featured synths that are like a workstation in themselves with multiple synthesis types and many more abilities, including effects if you want to use them.

Soon this synth will be the same price as those €149

Because they are not 8bit synths that sound old. Unless you are making something sound old intentionally you will be missing many contemporary sounds and synthesis abilities.

And as mentioned you could program or process to make many synths of the last decade sound rather like this one.

If you need this specific synth, are into nostalgia, love everything Waldorf, then you can buy and enjoy it. It all depends what you are doing.

The days of paying that price for a soft synth for myself are well and truly over. I can only speak for myself though. The market is beyond saturated.

And none of it makes your music better written or arguably sound better.

Trial it and you will know if this is for you, make your own decisions.

[gearwatcher]

I am a sound lover and just so happened to hear it mainly by chance. Mostly I don't bother but for some reason I disliked it quite a bit this time. It's 2024 and this is not good by 2024 standards.

What is good or better by 2024 standards? And why?

While I don't agree with the general motion of the poster you're replying to (2024 is just a number and not everything has gone forward in music tech), I think SurgeXT in particular makes this plugin obsolete as it implements this particular type of wavetable replay along with tons of other synthesis styles (including a different wavetable replay style), more filters, more filter types, more versatile modulation routing and modulation system and better selection of integrated FX.

The integrated FX are arguably a bit hit and miss in SurgeXT but the rest of the synthesiser is top notch, easily matching the commercial powerhorses like Pigments, Phaseplant and UVI Falcon, once you find your way around the UI.

[kmonkey]

Exactly. This synth delivers (and I really have a ton of them). But the best possible and really amazing thing is that we (under that I mean anyone) can run a Trial and decide does it works for your own sensibilities and your projects.

If yes then you know what to do. If not...skip. Simple.

[mothra]

blah blah blah TL;DR

So what? Get on with life and go elsewhere. This is a thread for Waldorf MicroWave fans enjoying the plugin along with our hardware. Nobody cares about your petty gripes and non-important opinion. Im sure someone else near you will listen to your ranting and will give you the attention you crave..

[Artie Fichelle]

We are not ranting, we are laughing, not at you, but for ourselves. As much as I enjoyed the original at 1990, plugins have evolved, and I don't need or want it anymore.

[Ah_Dziz]

I'm pretty sure this is just a thread discussing the Waldorf Microwave as a plugin much like the thread's title would suggest. The whole point of this place is for people to express their opinions whether positive or negative or indifferent, about synths.

Mothra, you could start a new thread titled "let's list all the positive opinions about the Microwave plugin that we can come up with" if you're bothered so much by people who don't share your opinions.

[MartyK]

I am a sound lover and just so happened to hear it mainly by chance. Mostly I don't bother but for some reason I disliked it quite a bit this time. It's 2024 and this is not good by 2024 standards.

What is good or better by 2024 standards? And why?

Serum, Massive X, maybe Dune 3 and Zebra 2.x and many other of the complex powerfully featured synths that are like a workstation in themselves with multiple synthesis types and many more abilities, including effects if you want to use them.

Soon this synth will be the same price as those €149

Because they are not 8bit synths that sound old. Unless you are making something sound old intentionally you will be missing many contemporary sounds and synthesis abilities.

And as mentioned you could program or process to make many synths of the last decade sound rather like this one.

If you need this specific synth, are into nostalgia, love everything Waldorf, then you can buy and enjoy it. It all depends what you are doing.

The days of paying that price for a soft synth for myself are well and truly over. I can only speak for myself though. The market is beyond saturated.

And none of it makes your music better written or arguably sound better.

Well, Massive and Serum are actually pretty good plugins, although I don't own Serum, but I've heard some sounds from it. Now, Microwave is an emulation, and if you like the character of these sounds and you can't create them with either Massive or Serum (I don't know, I'm just guessing!), then the Microwave plugin is also relevant and not superfluous.

I often hear about a "modern sound" - but is it necessarily better just because it's noise-free? There are many plugins today that can easily create an EDM sound - it may be modern, but does it really sound interesting? Modern just means that something is adapted to the current zeitgeist, not necessarily that something is better. Because many modern plugins are not better just because they contain "modern sounds". For example, I like the sounds of the Korg M1, Roland D50 and other old synths because they simply sound good and organic.

But I wouldn't want to pay the original price (149 euros) for the Waldorf plugin either, that's definitely too much.

The market may be more than saturated with plugins, but there are still many synths that are worth emulating and that cannot be easily or even completely replaced by modern plugins.

If some manufacturer were to one day bring an ultimate super synth onto the market as software that has excellent filters, oscillators and other good functionality, and where I can also be fairly certain that this synth is also future-proof and will be supported for many years, I would also pay several hundred euros for it.

[MartyK]

I am a sound lover and just so happened to hear it mainly by chance. Mostly I don't bother but for some reason I disliked it quite a bit this time. It's 2024 and this is not good by 2024 standards.

What is good or better by 2024 standards? And why?

While I don't agree with the general motion of the poster you're replying to (2024 is just a number and not everything has gone forward in music tech), I think SurgeXT in particular makes this plugin obsolete as it implements this particular type of wavetable replay along with tons of other synthesis styles (including a different wavetable replay style), more filters, more filter types, more versatile modulation routing and modulation system and better selection of integrated FX.

The integrated FX are arguably a bit hit and miss in SurgeXT but the rest of the synthesiser is top notch, easily matching the commercial powerhorses like Pigments, Phaseplant and UVI Falcon, once you find your way around the UI.

Thanks for the tip, I'll probably install SurgeXT.
If the integrated effects aren't that good, you can always use external ones that are better.

[temporubato]

The Microwave Plug-In recreates an instrument and its particular sound which has been developed 35 years ago in a time without any DSP chips widely available and without decent PC computing power allowing for realtime synthesis. Instead it used a custom designed chip (the Waldorf ASIC) which is doing the wavetable synthesis in a very particular way no other wavetable synth nowadays is doing. The original hardware has a very special sound much like the PPG had its own sound. That particular sound many musicians enjoy is available from the plug-in since it was missing before.

Modern state-of-the-art wavetable synths like our Quantum/Iridium or the already in this thread mentioned wavetable plug-ins are very flexible. The underlying math is known to most synth developers, so it's more about how do you package all those features into a compelling modern plug-in. If you then combine it with other synthesis methods like we did in Quantum/Iridium and others did in their plug-ins, you have a wonderful tools for sound designers. You have freeware options and commercial options. It's a wonderful spectrum of options the user has these days.

But something was missing to our feelings. There is this wonderful sonic spectrum of pre-DSP digital hardware like very early digital reverbs and delays, take for example the Quantec Room Simulator doing reverb without any audio processor just using discrete digital chips much like the PPG Wave and the Waldorf Microwave 1 which BTW was helped to be designed by Wolfgang Palm himself. In addition to the Microwave 1 only the Waldorf Wave was based on those ASIC chips. The later Microwave / Q / Blofeld generations were DSP based.

Look, there is a whole plethora of plug-ins modeling vintage analogue synths, and the best ones using component modeling techniques to achieve a level of sound quality no general purpose virtual analogue plug-in can achieve. The Microwave 1 plug-in does the same thing just for an early hybrid synth classic.

It has BTW nothing to do with low-fi or degraded sound etc. In fact, internally it runs at 250 kHz sampling rate as the original ASIC did and the 68k CPU based modulators are very unique and impossible to model with traditional synth techniques. It was much more complex to program than traditional modern style wavetable synthesis. It's more related how FPGAs work than traditional DSP math.

There are many great options of state-of-the-art swiss-army-knife wavetable plug-ins. And that's great. But if you want something truly special in sound leading back to the origins of Wavetable synthesis, then the PPG and Microwave plug-ins come into play. You may love the sound, or don't. But many do. And here we are. Peace.