New Synths Added to Electronics Gallery

Waldorf Wave atop the Kurzwiel K250

There’s some new eye/ear candy in the electronics gallery. Among the new treasures are an Emulator (formerly owned by Brian Kehew of the Moog Cookbook) a Waldorf Wave and a Yamaha DX-7II Centennial Edition. Before I talk about the sounds I would like to point out that these things just LOOK really cool. Especially the Wave, which looks like the mutant spawn of a Minimoog and a Waldorf Q on steroids. The Emulator has a very cool industrial early 80s computer look, with a very solid steel enclosure and a handy lil’ pocket for the floppy disks. I’m told it was designed by the same guy that did the case for the Apple II. Last but certainly not least, the DX-7. Granted, there are TONS of DX 7 and DX 7IIs floating around, there are only 100 of these Centennial versions in the world. It was made in ’88 for Yamaha’s 100th birthday and featured a silver paint job with gold buttons, slider and wheels. That alone seems pretty “bling” but the icing on the cake is the glow-in-the-dark keys! All three of these instruments were very expensive when they were new, and due to their rarity still are.

Now on to the sounds. The Wave is easily my favorite of the 3, because it’s a continuation of the wavetable-based PPG synths from the early 80s featured on lots of great synth pop, new wave and other recordings. It’s kind of slow to boot (from a floppy!) but it’s actually pretty intuitive to use. The DX-7II is nice too, but soundwise is no different than any other DX-7II out there. I’m not HUGE on FM synthesis, but it certainly does have it’s uses. There’s some neat patches in there right now which are mostly percussion stuff like tablas, gongs, etc. Then there’s the emulator. I’m not sure what my feelings are about vintage samplers. I’ve never drooled over them the same way that I do for other synths and drum-machines. As far as the sounds themselves go, you can easily load them into a software sampler, but a lot of the charm of these instruments is in their DACs (Digital Analog Converters). In lots of hip-hop and rap, beats that were made on a hardware sampler like an Akai MPC60 (DJ Shadow’s album “Endtroducing” was made entirely with one) or an Emu SP 1200 (which was used on lots of great music by De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, the Beastie Boys and even Daft Punk) sound a lot more punchy and “phat” than a lot of stuff being produced nowadays on computers and workstations. The Emulator does indeed have a very warm sound for an 8 bit sampler. JL showed me the french horn disk he had, which sounded quite rich and beautiful. Of course it helps when there are real analog filters and envelopes at work.