The latest episode of Sonic Touch takes a look at PPG WaveGenerator from Wolfgam Palm. In addition, Nick and Gaz take a look at a USB connection kit hub and the Keith McMillen Instruments Quneo.
If you’ve used PPG WaveGenerator or the QuNeo – let us know what you think of them!
via sonicstate
I wish PPG would go on sale, $20 is a lot of meat :). However, I am sure its worth it. Maybe next paycheck.
I read somewhere (maybe here) that they were not doing any intro pricing or sales pricing ever. I think they felt bad for people who buy an app to only see it go on sale a week later. I don’t have it either, but it looks pretty cool.
WaveGenerator is the best synth on iOS . And keep it coming with the Sonic Touch.
$20 is a steal. Support real developers, not half baked ones that come out with two of the exact same apps, add a keyboard and a new menu to the new one and charge you $10 bucks a piece for two pieces of shit that could of easily been integrated into that same original cloned app.
PPG is the direction I want to be headed in.
Yes, this is worth every penny. It has kinks to work out still(midi) but this makes sounds NONE of my other synths make.
It is a great synth, worth much more than 20 bucks. but i agree with Gaz: it looks awful.
I haven’t really found it worth the $20, it is just kind of “meh”, and I don’t care how legendary the guy behind it is.
I have high hopes for the Waldorf one…
WaveGenerator is a deep synth that can take a few weeks to get up to speed on, even if you’ve been programming synths for a while. If you put in the time, it’s rewarding. Clicking around for 10 minutes and and thinking you know something about it is not an honest evaluation. Gaz is right about the UI, it needs work and has that the-programmer-did-the-ui look to it. But give it time, it’s a 1.0. The engine is excellent and deep and great sounding. Also, Wofgang Palm has been very supportive. We need people like him creating synths for iOS. For the record, I think Cassini has one of the better interfaces, but even there I’d like to see developers move further from skeuomorphs to new interfaces that are touch centric without a nod to a past most users have no reference point for.
FYI I was inspired by the PPG and made this experimental spoken word song in two weeks while learning WaveGen. http://therefore.bandcamp.com/track/said Thanks Wolfgang.
It seems to be crashing at start-up under iOS 6. I’ll try re-installing it, later. Anyways, I disagree; I think it looks cool and editing is much better than it perhaps looks.
ime, the crash is not because of ios6. it’s because there’s a bug that the ppg has where it conflicts with certain other music apps. you need to restart your ipad to have the problem fixed—however, the “fix” only lasts until you open another app with which ppg conflicts. (hope this makes sense.)
for instance, i can run animoog and ppg at the same time, but not magellan and ppg.
i don’t know much about it other than i’ve experienced it and that the update to *really* fix it is pending apple’s approval (or so says wolfgang on the ppg facebook page).
I have PPG Wavegenerator and it is kind of meh. The sound is fine but the layout and playabilty are severly lacking. It is powerful but editing is a pain and it isn’t intuitive.
I had the quneo. I don’t know if I got one that had been damaged or what but it never worked correctly and was so cheaply made that the sensors didn’t work half the time and the sliders would almost rock out of the slots from the pressure needed for them to register.
Maybe it’s because I was too young to actually have to use 80s music software, but I think WaveGenerator looks retro-cool rather than just retro. 🙂
I don’t think it’s THAT complex. It takes effort to make interesting wave sequences and there are a lot of possibilities, but it still uses most of the same language as your classic subtractive synth.
What I feel it is a bit retro is the lack of a percussion mode with different voices per note. Even if we only got 4 voices it’d be great. Wave Generator is excellent for drum synthesis (try it!), but I don’t want to multitrack!
For me, one of the biggest changes in music is that the percussive elements have come to take a much more prominent role, but a lot of synths are seemingly still designed with the mindset that all you want to make are funky basses and ethereal pads. Not to pick on PPG WaveGenerator though, All things considered it’s one of the more innovative synths to be released in recent memory.