KORG modwave 🧻🧻🧻

Update May 2022: I sold it. The latest update of Vital made a swing and punched modwave right smack in the puss. And it doesn’t look like Korg has an upgrade answer. It will be soon made software and I’m not waiting around for that. Got my money back. Lost the toilet roll.

Update November 2022: the ‘native’ software version arrived. It looks like Pigments without the horrible rainbow colour scheme. It has the control surfaces and sequencers of the keyboard version – but it just immediately makes you think of using Pigments instead, so as to get the extra features. I don’t think this was a good plan.

April 2022. Voila! A sale on eBay at half the going price, from a seller who hadn’t gone past a few diddles before putting it back in the box. So I staged a boxing match. I thought that wavetable based hardware wouldn’t provide the same power as software like Vital. But to my surprise there are some places where modwave gives some stiff competition. It has picked up a toilet roll.

Firstly let’s agree that any wavetable synthesiser is software. Whether the original Waveterm, or the Blofeld, or the Hydrasynth – you could be running it on a PC. The utility ratio between the computer display and the control surface then measures the benefit of being hardware – the Blofeld is tedious without SoftKnobs (and so Largo is in some ways a better option), whereas Hydrasynth is well represented by its front panel.

Secondly I hold an expectation from a wavetable synthesiser. In exactly the same way as the user must be able to design the elements of synthesis – the filters, the envelopes etc. a wavetable synthesiser must allow the user to design the wavetables. Put a different way – synthesis starts with the table, that being the advantage over standard analogue. No hardware I have seen meets this specification, although some like the Blofeld, Microfreak and the modwave can import from software.

Even then hardware has difficulty managing a library of tables. UltraNova simply lines them up randomly by number, Hydrasynth offers up some cute but quite meaningless names to gauge by ear. Access Virus TI makes a decent effort by providing the names in the TI software editor.

modwave in the ring

modwave can operate without the software editor, but many things are easier on a big screen – simple things like patching an LFO to a oscillator. It includes more than 260 wavetables with real names that you can learn – a difficult blur to read on the little display. Quite a few are specific to the locked preset patches (a whole junk yard full belong to Richard Devine who seems intent on invading every synthesiser I own) which adds bulk and confusion. I would love to delete all the locked patches.

With time I’ve begun to appreciate the soft/hardware interfaces in combination. Larger changes are made on screen, then tweaked with the hardware. modwave is not as powerful as Serum, but it feels like a musical instrument with a specific character you can master.

Who needs a modwave? I bought it same way people buy Disney Princesses – gotta have all three KORGs. It’s best for people that actually perform live or jam with other musicians. The control surface is aimed at performance – things like the Kaoss physics and the modulation knobs mean you can bend and stretch and shape your patches on the fly. modwave docks into your studio rig and talks to your software, then goes out into the world independently performing the patches you have created at home.

It also has 4Gb of sample memory so you can take a large slab of samples on the road with no loading time. But I would more likely take the wavestate because I am more about crashing odd noises into each other (hen-brick, car-horse) than synthetic sounds as such.

Vital would always be my first recommendation. If you care about your own wavetables and you must have hardware then this is your most advanced solution. If you will not accept software of any kind then you probably should give up on custom tables and go with Virus TI or a Waldorf.