PPG wave 2.3 cold winter soundscapes

synthlegends

"By pure chance I got a PPG wave 2.3 for a very fair and decent price. The appearance was not very nice, a lot of scratchs on the cover and dirt inside. But I cleaned it and made some paint work, so now it looks beautiful again.

Also the keyboard was broken. I played my PPG via Midi with a master keyboard. That is why I decided not to shot a video while playing. Sorry that I show only some personal footage of winter shots of our beautiful landscape riding with a friend on my bike or walking with kids in with a lot of snow to describe the coldness of the PPG, Of course I added a lot of cool pictures of my new blue baby.
Now the PPG is in service, gets a new fatar keyboard, refurbishment and a new power supply unit plus new display from synthtaste (www. Synthtaste.com).


I never thought that I will ever purchase a PPG and now I am so happy to own one. Most of my favourite albums in the 80ies consisted this undistinguishable sound, like Power Windows from Rush, Worlds Apart from SAGA, Welcome to the pleasuredome from FGTH.

The PPG 2.3 was the latest of all PPG wave (produced from 1984 until 1989). Around 400 units must have been built. The forerunners were the PPG wave 2.0 with only one oscillator and CEM filter chips (1981), after that the PPG wave 2.2 with two oscillators and SEM Filter chips. The wave 2.3 is with 16 bit sample rate instead of 12 bit and is also multitimbral with midi.


The PPG is really one of my favourite synths beside my beloved Sequential Circuits Prophet VS and my Modal Electronics 002 which imitates the PPG quite well.

I have also a John Bowen Solaris with alle waveforms form the PPG, but it isn't the same thing of course. The PPG has its own unique sound because of its decent filter and musical aliasing.
This demo is just recorded, when my PPG arrived. I just tweaked the sounds, went through some wavetables and played everything life without any fx or mastering directly with two audio mono outs to generate a stereo track in my DAW. Please notice that I also used the stereo knob to enhance the stereo field.


I will surely make more videos from my PPG as soon I get it back refurbished.

Cheers and take care, Rüdiger"