Photo credit: Meghan MacKrous, courtesy of the National Music Centre

Waldorf Wave

Available for use in Recording Studios

Not currently on exhibit

Artifact TypeSynthesizer

Date1993

The Waldorf Wave was first produced by Waldorf Electronics GmbH in 1993. Since its inception in 1988, Waldorf has focused on the production of high-end digital synthesizers. Today, the Wave is regarded as among the most sophisticated and expressive synthesizers, while also boasting an intuitive user interface. Along with similar synthesizers such as the Sequential Circuits Prophet VS of 1986, the Waldorf Wave’s arrival in the early 1990s contributed significantly to a shift in the synthesizer market, which had been dominated by Japanese manufacturers such as Yamaha, Roland, and Korg, throughout the 1980s.

Operation/FunctionThe Waldorf Wave generates its sound via digital wavetable oscillators (two per voice), with this particular unit capable of producing up to sixteen-voice polyphony. Onboard are two analog filters (24 dB/octave low-pass and 12 dB/octave high-pass), 256-patch memory, an analog amplifier, and a noise generator. The instrument is MIDI compatible. It contains a five-octave (C-C, 61 notes) keyboard with velocity and aftertouch.Cultural SignificanceThe Waldorf Wave emerged as one of the most sophisticated and expressive synthesizers, while also boasting a highly intuitive user interface. Its arrival in the early 1990s contributed heavily to a shift in the synthesizer market, which had throughout most of the 1980s been dominated by Japanese manufacturers such as Yamaha, Roland, and Korg.Technological SignificanceThe synthesizer is arguably one of, if not the most technologically significant contributions to the course of electronic music. Although earlier electronic instruments such as the Theremin, Clavivox, and Ondes Martenot offered new and unique ways of articulating sound, their sonic template was, for the most part, quite limited, capable of producing only a few distinct timbres. The modern synthesizer, on the other hand, was viewed as an integrated electronic orchestra, as it were, allowing the user to sculpt a wide and varied array of tones and gestures. What’s more, it allowed the user to modify their sounds in real time, seemingly without the sorts of physical limitations imposed on acoustic instruments. Of course, each instrument did come with its own characteristic tonal qualities and control limitations, however the wealth of opportunity inherent in the ability to manipulate and define nearly every parameter of sound structure solidified the synthesizer’s place as one of the most powerful musical innovations of the twentieth century. The concept of modular design was initially quite desirable to professional and studio musicians in that it allowed one to more or less completely customize their instrument and modify its functions as desired. Although modular-type systems are still in production today, the advent of affordable eight-bit microprocessor-based integrated circuitry in the mid 1970s and the rise of programmable polyphonic instruments in the late 1970s resulted in the relative obsolescence of the discrete transistor-based systems of the early 1970s. Synthesizers increasingly began to adopt the smaller, more compact aesthetic exhibited in these performance-oriented instruments, especially that of the revered Minimoog. The once popular modular approach gave way to more streamlined designs that, while still offering users the ability to control numerous aspects of the instrument’s tone and gesture, limited the way in which the instrument could be operated. In the early 1970s, integrated circuits emerged in synthesizers, housing the many discrete components of transistor-based circuits within a single silicon chip, as they are often called. Integrated circuits were significantly smaller and less expensive to manufacture than the circuits from which they derived. With the introduction of the first affordable eight-bit microprocessors in the mid 1970s, such as the Zilog Z80, integrated circuits adapted to incorporate more sophisticated digital components. The massively influential Yamaha DX7 of 1983 was among the first in a generation of synthesizers that were entirely digital, replacing voltage-controlled and digitally controlled analog oscillators with computer-generated waveforms. Although computers had existed for decades prior in the form of both analog and digital iterations, it was not until the early 1980s that the latter became increasingly mass-produced and, thus, more affordable for and accessible to the consumer market, with the relatively compact home and personal computers becoming a reality by the mid 1980s. These fully digital instruments had several advantages over their analog counterparts: they were far more flexible, allowing for greater programming and memory capabilities, far more stable with the ability to remain in tune, significantly less expensive, and generally smaller and even more streamlined. The Waldorf Wave had many unparalleled functions for the time, and is still regarded as one of the most sophisticated synthesizers to have ever emerged in the commercial market. The fundamental operation of all digital synthesizers is based on the generation of binary code (a stream of 0s and 1s indicating either ‘off’ or ‘on’ functions, respectively), which processes information at a set sampling rate; the higher the sampling rate, the faster the computer. Another common feature of all digital synthesizers is the incorporation of a powerful digital-to-analog converter, enabling loudspeakers and associated amplification systems to produce corresponding audio signals. Despite its complex appearance, wavetable synthesis is in fact very straightforward in its principles. As a replacement of preceding digital synthesis methods, wavetable synthesis had the advantage of requiring little memory to store its individual waves at full resolution, and little capacity to process wave combinations, as their combined behaviours had already been calculated and stored in tables – an important factor considering the considerable limitations on memory in early digital technology. Along with similar wavetable synthesizers such as the Sequential Circuits Prophet VS of 1986, the PPG Wave of 1987, and the Korg Wavestation of 1990, this form of synthesis represented the next step in the progression of digital application, following the implementation of digital frequency modulation (FM) synthesis in instruments such as the DX7. In addition to wavetable synthesis, computer-based tone generation also gave way to several other new and more complex forms of synthesis that required high-speed microprocessing capabilities, such as physical modeling and granular synthesis. The DX7 remained the most successful digital synthesizer of the 1980s, with similar products offered from competing companies following throughout the decade; as such, control of the commercial synthesizer market shifted in the 1980s from the United States to Japan, with many of the original manufacturers of the 1970s, such as Sequential Circuits and ARP Instruments, folding due to the inability to compete. With the introduction of instruments such as the PPG Wave and the Waldorf Microwave in the late 1980s, however, market trends once again shifted away from dominance in overseas manufacturing. The workstation synthesizer-sampler became the new product of the early 1990s, allowing the user to merge both worlds, offering samples and editing and modifying capabilities in addition to more studio-inspired sequencing and multi-track features for composition. Modern digital synthesizers such as the Waldorf Q still incorporate something of a hybrid approach, offering high quality samples that can be modified as well as a series of sophisticated digital synthesis and signal processing techniques, including those that perform a sort of “analog modeling”, imitating the revered icons of the 1970s. In addition to hardware digital synthesizers, software synthesis – that is, the implementation of computer applications and programs that enable highly flexible synthesis and sampling environments – is also among the most practiced forms of computer music, gaining particular notoriety within the past few decades thanks to sophisticated programs such as max/MSP and SuperCollider.Users/PerformersNotable users of the Waldorf Wave include many popular musicians of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Depeche Mode, Enya, The Orb, and film composer Hans Zimmer.

Object number2007.01.41