Who doesn’t know PPG? Wolfgang Palm Products GmbH? Actually most people – a search for PPG software now brings up PPG Paintmanager, an awfully quick online forgetting. Wolfgang Palm? Invented wavetables? No, it didn’t start with Serum. Wolfgang retired at age 70 and said he was handing his brain over to Brainworx. As far as anyone can tell they just tipped it into the brain bin. Not a peep has come of it. Which is a terrible pity.
Palm never stopped inventing new ways to synthesise sounds. Although he made some titles for desktop computers they quickly made their way to iPad, probably due to piracy. But even there they didn’t last very long – I’m very lucky to have bought them in that window, and that they still work on my not very new pad.
They are not conceptually specific to the Pad. To be honest I’ve not used them much – partly because the iPad is too small screened for such intricate controls and partly because, well, they are a bit inscrutable and use weird terminology.
WaveMapper
WaveMapper uses a ‘SoundMap’, which is a ‘module manipulation tool’, which ‘defines the morphing’. You place things in the circles which you hope will lead to a good sound, you know not why. Maybe it has to do with using the ‘tolerate’ control. It uses samples, as well as Time Corrected Samples. I am sure this is a good thing. I think. Sadly I must be bad at it because my sounds could have been made far more easily on a different tool.
From what I gather Palm has tried to address user control over the vast number of harmonics used in spectral synthesis. I think that each little icon creates harmonics or restricts them or changes them over time. Palm’s not very clear about it.
Infinite
I have much more confidence with Infinite as it’s a wavetable synthesiser with added noise. Sensible Review. Noise just used in a wavetable becomes a tone by it being looped – the noise here is added in the harmonic processing of the sounds and so more organic in the result, capable of both harmonic (melodic) and in-harmonic (timbre) elements. But the controls are small and there are odd words like ‘molder’ which could really be ‘filter’. Other makers have simply added noise as a sound source alongside the wavetable, which is not as clever but much easier to conceptualise.
As with WaveMapper I simply can’t get sounds out of this instrument that make it worthwhile. I move the XY panners, I tweak the spectrums, I switch between the molder’s characters – a feeling of hopelessness descends upon me. Nothing I do feels intuitive or organic. I turn it off.
It seems unfair that PPG was overtaken by other makers, but maybe the cutting edge did not need to be so bleeding edge.