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$2,499 waldorfmusic.com

Germany’s Waldorf has been around since the 1980s, rising out of the ashes of Wolfgang Palm’s famed synth company PPG. PPG and Palm found success with the various ‘Wave’ synths which used the newly commercialized technique of wavetable synthesis. You’ll find more on the history and development of the wavetable concept over the page, but the key concept behind this method of synthesis lies in the way in which the oscillators generate their sounds. Rather than having a conventional analog oscillator with a range of basic waveform shapes (square, sawtooth etc), wavetable synthesizers use digital memory to store more complex single-cycle wave shapes that can then be filtered and modulated as usual. Still, the way these complex forms are stored allows you to move between adjacent waveforms easily.

Sets of these waveforms are stored in a ‘wavetable’, with the ability to adjust from where in the table these waveforms are accessed. Moving through the table results in progressive timbral changes – though it’s up to