Happy 10th birthday! Now grow up!
Happy 12th birthday – look – you’re all grown up now! And black!
Using the first Largo after Serum was a painful experience – the interface was tiny, cluttered and very grey. (Not surprising as Axel Hartman designed it, as he did the Alesis Ion which is also tiny, cluttered and very grey.) Now there is Largo 2 and it has finally embiggened. I can’t say that it has become any prettier but at least there is a dark skin now. The white one is a little hard on the eyes.
If you would prefer a modern interface, then Waldorf’s Nave might suit you better. But that’s quite a different animal to the older Waldorf instruments, and I will explain why.
Largo is a close sister to the Blofeld (which is why it appears here under ‘virtual wood’). Both are wavetable synthesisers but are best thought about as well made virtual analogues with wavetables as just part of the plan. You drive the sound through virtual components, making a warm, fuzzy ‘analogue’ sound that gets only harsher once you start adding cross modulation. The tactics are same as you’d try with the MS2000 or BassStation2. Push – push hard for burn!
Given the age of the software the quality of the emulation is extremely good – as good as Roland has only recently achieved with ACB. Of course the Blofeld is just as much software as Largo. You have a choice – do you want to have a an external box running software, which you must control remotely (as the few knobs on the box are not much fun) or would you prefer to see virtual controls on a computer screen? The most recent version of the SoftKnobs Blofeld editor is quite robust.
Largo doesn’t include sample playback, and doesn’t have slots for your own wavetables. It produces many times the voices of the Blofeld – and each oscillator has its own sub oscillator. The on screen controls make patching more intuitive. But then Blofeld is ready to make noise as soon as turned on. Samples are instantly ready, no loading required. You would only play one sound at a time though, as Blofeld’s voice count will cut out sooner. Those few knobs won’t do much tweaking either.
Largo 2 has sprinkled a few features here and there – there are now four layers – LFO3 can be hand drawn – and there are formant filters. It now compares to other soft analogues with wavetables (e.g. u-he Hive 2) but the interface really needs a more confident refresh. Waldorf – look at Vital. You’re not there yet.
I will always like LARGO. Something cool is to turn up “Brilliance” when a wavetable is selected. It sounds exactly like PPG. To get into Waldorf Pulse, you can select a basic waveform like sawtooth, ensure “Bass Boost” is ON, and you will be there oscillator wise. I spent days figuring that out. Wolfram said they went to lengths to ensure that was possible. I run my desktop at a resolution where LARGO and VSTi’s of that era (a la Hartmann Neuron etc.) are nice and huge. Seems fun to me. I still haven’t taken the deep dive with this so maybe I will.
I’m feeling really positive about this.
I’ve got Largo, PPG3.V, a Blofeld, and own a couple Waldorf NW1 modules.
Guess I dig wavetables.
The Largo can do some pretty Blofeldy things. The filter models are the same.
The only real differences are that the Largo can actually sync to external MIDI without little hiccups. Though for some reason I feel like the Blofeld has a meatier sound when similar patches are being played on either.
PPG3.V sounds much better than PPG2.V and has a few more features than the older VST. But the interface is even worse than Largo. I still use it for things that Blofeld or Largo can do because sometimes being forced to color within the lines is useful. Only 2 envelopes one LFO and one filter means you have to think about it more.
Out of all of them the NW1 is the best sounding wavetable device Waldorf ever made. It allow you to modulate not just position on the sequence of waves, and ‘spectrum’ but also the interpolation parameters like brilliance and noisy. I’ve gotten Miles Davis sounds out of mine using stock waves. Plus it has text to speech. Fire your vocalist! But sometimes I am not in the mood to patch up the modular stuff and try to sync it with a drum machine.
One of these days I’m going to learn Pure Data and make a wavetabler to run on my Organelle.
See I have the excellent Wave Edit form Synthesis Technology. And aside from my NW1s I cannot load the wavetables it makes on anything else really. I can fake it within Logic’s sampler to play them. Or do similar in my Octatrack. But neither of those are really doing wavetables the same way the PPG did, or the Largo/Nave does. It’s rather pointless that the leading wavetable company’s products just don’t load user wavetables.
Do their new product allow user wavtables? I’ll never know unless I discover the goose that lays golden eggs.
You just have to try Vital. It’s a next generation to all the old PPG clones – things have moved on.