Digital genius: Happy Birthday Wolfgang Palm!

 

On Wolfgang Palm's birthday, it is difficult to enlist just how revolutionary his synthesis method, and the resulting synthesizer, was in the late 1970s.

What the public later became acquainted with under the name PPG Wave was the result of sublime inventiveness and practical genius. 

Palm invented the synthesis method based on rapid cycling through tables of waveforms, the resulting spectral richness and truly unique character of the sounds making it instantly recognisable. 

The key distinction between what some call wavetable synths (which play back complex waveforms, even entire sounds from digital samples) and Palm's method was the use of single-cycle waveforms in tables that the digital circuitry was sweeping / cycling through. Controlling the tables of waveforms, the way in which the sweeps were done etc. one could create astonishing sounds.

Palm's practical engineering genius was not just in the construction of the early prototypes that were fully usable as musical instruments, but also in the creation of the wavetables. Most of the PPG Wave and Waveterm "factory" wavetables are to this day absolute classics, and many digital synths and samplers have imitations or recreations of these classic and unique sounds. 

Nobody sounded like Edgar Froese and Tangerine Dream in the very late 1970s and in 1980, as they were the supremely "lucky" electronic musicians to get their hands on early incarnations of Palm's invention.

If we listen today to Froese's Stuntman solo album and Tangerine Dream albums like Tangram and Exit, we are still struck by the beauty and the timeless nature of the sounds emanating from the PPG Wave synths.

Later it permeated electronic music genres ranging from space ambient to synth-pop, the number and kind of artists using the PPG synths is staggering. One finds the characteristic sounds on everything from A-ha to Ultravox records.

A testament to the enduring value of the synthesis method is that Waldorf synths have brought us many immensely beefed-up variants (including plugins that recreate the classic PPG Wave versions' sounds). 

Waldorf Wave, a hugely expensive monster, was one example - but much more affordable and powerful later incarnations of the technology are with us today. 

Waldorf microWave and Blofeld are just two examples, and Behringer have also announced that they would create a PPG Wave clone. At which point one has to mention that the latter had analogue filters, which gave it extra character - and Blofeld for example models these filters digitally.

Happy Birthday Wolfgang Palm and huge gratitude for revolutionising the electronic sound landscape!