Keyboard Magazine - March 2008 - (Page 50) AUDITION CLAVIA NORD WAVE but welcome, is a comb mode for phasey effects, and a vocal setting where playing with the cutoff and resonance produces convincing vowels. Combined with turning on the filter’s velocity sensitivity (which opens up the cutoff the harder you play), this instantly evoked some funky, quacky, squirty leads and comping, no matter what the patch started out sounding like. Envelopes. The dedicated amp and filter envelopes are the classic ADSR type. I hear you tweakheads going, “Only one amp envelope? What if I want different ones on each oscillator?” Remember that in slot B, you have not just another amp envelope, but an entire second synthesizer with which to create this kind of sonic counterpoint. Need a pitch envelope? The “Mod Env” section is a simple attack/decay (or attack/release — your choice) envelope you can assign to either or both oscillator pitches, filter cutoff, or a handful of other parameters. LFOs. These are also straightforward, and each LFO is assignable to six destinations. Those are a little different for each: LFO1 can affect stereo panning, filter cutoff, and the Shape knobs of either or both oscillators, but can only modulate the pitch of oscillator 2. LFO2 can hit both oscillator pitches, filter resonance as well as cutoff, but only oscillator 1’s Shape. Both can modulate the “Osc Mod” parameter described above. IN USE We’ve gone through a laundry list of features that make the Wave both a very robust virtual analog synth and the most stable player of user samples in existence. But some of us are hard to please, aren’t we? “So I can put a sampled whatever next to a modeled analog-type wave,” I hear you sneering, “Is that really so much better than putting a sampled whatever next to a sampled analog-type wave, using the workstation I’ve had for five years?” For sound design work and live performance, yes, it is. This isn’t just because both Wave’s virtual analog and sample-based oscillators put out superb sound quality. It’s because of morphing, which is what I spent most of my time with the Wave exploring. Like on the discontinued Nord Lead 3, morphing is how the Wave does realtime modulation. It lets you define and sweep through ranges of several settings at once from a single, finger-friendly controller. If you’ve ever used soft synths that have macro knobs, the idea is similar, but Wave has the edge for easy setup and flexibility. Hold down one of the three source buttons to select the controller (key velocity, note number, or mod wheel/control pedal), then tweak a knob by the exact amount you want. That knob motion will then replay when you work the controller. Want the filter cutoff to clamp down slightly as the mod wheel goes all the way up? Hold down the “Wheel/Ped” button as you “record” a short counterclockwise twist. Want to floor the resonance knob and scare small children with that same mod wheel rise? Record a big clockwise twist. Want the width of your pulse wave to change as you play the keyboard? Hold the “Keyboard” button and twist away — higher notes will move the setting further in the direction in which you turned the knob. You can use all three morph sources at once, and each can govern separate but overlapping stables of up to 26 parameters. Both the oscillator mix and output level of each slot (this is different from the Wave’s master volume) are among the morph-able settings, which means you can create sounds with very complex crossfades. At the beginning, I said that the Wave doesn’t do keyboard splits per se, but in a program that uses both slots, fading their output levels in opposite directions using the keyboard as source is how you’d approximate one. As Steve Buscemi said while machine-gunning that Armageddon asteroid, “This is so much fun it’s freaky!” Not as fun is the fact that though the Wave’s keyboard senses aftertouch, you can’t use it as a morph controller — you could on the Nord Lead 3. At this time, aftertouch seems to be reserved for triggering the Wave’s “vibrato” effect, which is separate from the two LFOs and, unlike them, doesn’t have a rate knob. Vibrato speed is a global setting in the system menu, and one of the only actual sound parameters on the Wave that doesn’t get its own knob. Depth increases in response to aftertouch, and ranges from subtle to almost the kind of Bernie Worrell turkey-gobble you’d get by rapidly rocking the Wave’s peerless pitchbend stick. This is both good and bad: It’s good because vibrato is the most common use for aftertouch, and you can get it without tying up either of the LFOs. It’s bad because aftertouch appears to be off-limits for anything else — you’ll need to use one of the other morph sources. To be fair, you could do so all day and not exhaust the possibilities for interesting and inspiring sound-sculpting. However, given that the Wave replaces the Lead 3 as flagship of Clavia’s “badass performance synth” category, this still feels like a weird omission, because some players will want to do other things without taking their fingers off the keyboard. Fortunately, downloading OS updates and pumping them into the Wave over USB is very easy: It took about two minutes to update the beta firmware in my review unit to the 1.00 retail version, so let’s hope that a future such update expands the role of aftertouch. The manual refers to oscillator 1’s single-cycle digital waves as “wavetables,” and on a few famous and bygone digital synths (many of which also had “Wave” in the name), this term implied wave sequencing: Rhythmically stepping through the list, or table, of waveforms to create harmonic change and interest. If you’re a serious synth-head, you’re bound to wonder if Clavia’s Wave does this. Not internally, and not via morphing, because the oscillators’ LED dials are among the tiny handful of knobs that aren’t morph-able. Of course, you could pull it off with an external sequencer, because all the Wave’s controls, buttons and knobs alike, transmit MIDI. I sequenced and played back all manner of crazy waveform changes from MOTU Digital Performer, and though I wasn’t obsessive enough (that day) to reorder the wave sequence by editing an event list, that door is open. Workstation keyboards are building in more knobs and faders than ever, but there’s still an immediacy about Clavia’s knob-per-function approach that’s hard to beat in live performance. I can’t count the number of times, both under the gun onstage or diddling in the studio, when I’ve thought, “This is almost the right sound, but it needs a little more or less [insert setting here].” If I have that thought while playing any of the latest workstations, I still wind up reaching for the program change dial more than half the time. On the Wave, that reduces to around 25 per cent of the time. In other words, I get what I need by synthesizing as I go. WAVE MANAGER A free download for Mac OS X or Windows XP and Vista, the Nord Wave Manager is more than a pipeline for pumping samples into the Wave keyboard. It’s a full-on sample editor. You can adjust start, stop, and loop points, normalize and adjust gain, and even make a key-mapped, crossfaded multisample out of several WAV files you’ve added in the Audio File/Assign pane. All changes are audible in real time through your computer’s audio interface, and when you like what you hear, click “Generate” to load your polished sound into the keyboard’s next available, non-volatile memory location. You can then access that location, and play the sample, from the Wave’s second oscillator. One thing neither the Wave nor its Manager seems to support: velocity-switched samples. Here, I’ve added a loop phase to a Rhodes chord riff I grabbed from eQuipped’s Smokers Relight Deux. Its fate is to be part of an eeriesounding pad with lots of internal motion. keyboard 03-2008
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