RIFFS
plug-ins... Waldorf PPG 3.V
baby
The Waldorf PPG Wave 2 digital synthesiser makes a welcome return in virtual form thanks to this new and improved plug-in...
Words: D.P. Wilson
SRP: €169.00 Contact: Waldorf Music
www.waldorfmusic.de
When I first started making music using keyboards, analogue synthesisers were in the throes of being replaced by the latest digital machines. If you had an old analogue dinosaur your only hope was to get a small amount back by selling it to somebody who didn’t know better to help fund your new digital purchase. The advent in the last ten years of computer based software Synths has seen a complete change around. Today there is virtually no classic analogue synth that hasn’t been emulated in an attempt to recreate those classic, fat sounds of those old devices. However, with very little exception recreations of digital Synths are little thin on the ground. So when one turns up to whet our appetite we normally sit up and take notice.
Back to the future... The synth we are looking at here is the Waldorf PPG 3.V which is designed to be a faithful, but improved emulation of the classic PPG Wave 2 which was first released in 1981. The PPG 3.V plug in is the latest release from German company Waldorf who have been around in one form or another since the late ‘80s and whose links with the original Palm Products GmbH (PPG) led to a generation of synths that shared a lineage with the original PPG Wave concept. The new PPG.3V plug-in runs on both PC and Mac and operates either
The original PPG Wave 2 was very expensive but Waldorf’s new soft synth version offers classic PPG tones for a fraction of the original price.
36 pickup
as a VSTi or Audio Unit, during the test the processor load seemed low enough not to challenge the processing ability of my own PC (first generation Quad core). At this stage it is probably a good idea to quickly outline what the original PPG Wave Synths were all about: The original PPG Wave 2 was released way back in 1981 for a cool £5000,meaning that this machine didn’t find its way into too many teenagers’ bedrooms and was strictly reserved for pop stars only! The PPG featured fairly normal analogue envelope generators and filters but with the addition of digital oscillators. Synths up till this stage had
featured analogue oscillators which were susceptible to pitch drift and at best offered a range of maybe half a dozen waveforms. The PPG machines weighed in with much more harmonically complex digital waveforms, and the PPG offered a phenomenal 64 waveforms in 30 wavetables! Without getting in too deep this essentially meant that your choices were virtually unlimited in the waveform department. Later versions (Wave 2.2/2.3) increased this capability still further. The early digital technology wasn’t perfect though, and early models suffered from digital aliasing which is a noise/distortion artefact of the low digital bit rates of the day. Back then though this was just thought of as part of the sound and the PPG Wave was used by everybody from Bowie to Depeche Mode to Frankie Goes To Hollywood. So, back to 2011 and we now have the software reincarnation PPG3.V.
Bit for brains... I did spend a day with a road weary PPG2.2
many years back and as I recall it was a fun beast although at the time was probably being trumped by some of the more recent digital Synths that were emerging. I will attempt to use these dark recesses of my memory to make comparisons with the new PPG3.V. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is the
first thing you notice and strikes a nice balance between sticking as closely as possible to the original and the modern necessity for ease of use. It is also a good size, remaining functional without the screen real estate taking too much
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