Waldorf M: the "m" stands for Mood

Anyone who's read any of my hybrid/Quantum related posts will probably have come across me making a gushing reference to the Waldorf M's filter. But where is the gushing over the instrument itself? I thought it was time to finally rectify that with an M-dedicated post. 

Let's get this out of the way: I LOVE the sound of gritty digital waveforms. The combo of weird guttural harmonics and (ideally) some crunchy imaging noise and/or aliasing just speaks to me at a fundamental sonic level. Like a Laurie Spiegel rocking the Alles machine level (all analog, I know). For as much as I love vintage analog blips and bloops musically, early digital waveforms just seem to fully represent the nexus of computers and electronics, intertangled in their own attempt to recreate a harmonic series.

And when you start adding movement to them in the form of wavetables? Whoa nelly. I could listen to the shifting churning sound of "High Harm" until the cows come how. And no one has done a better job of single-handedly capturing that market than Waldorf. Obviously PPG were the first on the block to make this sound accessible to all, but these days if you're talking about accessible wavetable action in hardware, you're talking about Waldorf. 

I have a lot to say about the PPG sound and legacy—mostly that it's a lot of overblown nostalgia and obsessing over some really boring presets that Tangerine Dream played that one time. But also, that much of what we imagine to be so great about that sound is wrong. The waveforms certainly grinded in their own unique, metallic way, but they weren't exactly crunchy, due to the variable clock rate of the oscillators. The filters—once they decided to add them post-PPG 360—also by and large SUCKED. Whether it was the CEM 3320 on the PPG 2 or the SSM 2044 on the 2.x, these mostly felt like fancy EQs, a resonant afterthought that was only slightly better than your car's Baxandall treble control. The focus was always the oscillator. 

This tepid approach to filters extended into the Waldorf domain too. For all the Wave/Microwave rev. A vs Mwave rev. B CEM variant arguments, neither is particularly amazing (the Wave at least added a nice highpass filter). They serve a function and they do it fine but I never feel like they are part of the "sound". The star is always the wavetable itself and all that wonderful ASIC crunch. On the XT, Waldorf upped the crunch even further and loaded that thing up with some super zany digital filters, which more than makes up for the insipid LPF and its variants on that machine. And then there's the Quantum, with its very useful but ultimately purely vanilla custom analog filter that, again, does the job but hardly contributes anything distinct.

Which brings us to the M where Waldorf seems to have had an about-face after 37 years of meh filters. Despite the M being a cross between the Microwave and the XT, and the obvious filter choice being something CEM, Waldorf veered back toward the OG PPG 2.x and the SSM filter. Perhaps it was the sudden availability of SSM 204x clones but in any case, Waldorf embraced this. 

What really strikes me about the M's SSM 2044 clone is that it doesn't sound like any SSM 2044-based synth I've used in the past (and I've used a lot). Those 2044 synths, the Monopolys, the Poly-6s, the Kawai SX-240, the Voyetra-8, the UDO Super-6... their filters all kind of sound similar. Not identical, mind, but similar: a pleasant and slightly liquidy but not overly characterful LPF. Now word on the street is that the SSM 2040 is where it's really at, as any self-serving vintage synth collector/boffin will tell you. Yes, the Prophet-5 rev3 is good, but darlink, you simply must hear ze rev2. There's purportedly some ephemeral musical quality to the 2040 that is lacking on the 2044. 

Saying that, I've always suspected that the 2040/2044 were actually more similar than different and the differences were partially (mostly?) down to how they were implemented/peripheral parts. And likewise the tonal variations in the 2044. The M must be proof of this because the SSM 2044 filter clone on the M does not sound like any other filter I've ever used. Unlike the PPGs of yore, the filter is now the star of the show. It meditates on harmonics and lingers on low resonant frequencies in a way I've just never heard on any other filter. It ADDS to the sound and boosts harmonics that you weren't even thinking about in a very musical fashion. A few quick filter tweaks gets you a record-ready pad sound before you've even touched a wavetable. 

A big part of the M filters sound is the bass-loss it exhibits with increased resonance. This is classic Moog filter behaviour, but these days there's been a big push against this and it seems like everyone and their grandmother is rushing to put out synths that don't "suffer" from any bass loss. But that (bass) loss is actually your gain for two reasons: 1) higher frequency harmonics become picked out and more prominent when the fundamental isn't dominating the frequency spectrum—this creates viby-er resonant sounds and is great for pads; 2) removing the bass cuts out the "mud" in a sound and makes it very mix-friendly (see most vintage Roland synths in this regard). And the resulting sound is not just "musical" in this case, it's moody and murky as hell. There's no happy, zappy filter sounds here. The Ensoniq ESQ-1/SQ-80, with its CEM filter variant, was very similar in this regard and had its own wonderful melancholy character. The M filter goes even further down that alley at dusk being oozier and a more rubbery (and also capable of self-oscillation). And just like the Ensoniq's the M's filter loves to saturate in an exceedingly pleasant and musical way. 

So the filter is all well and good but there's also lots of other elements to love, like the wonderful ring mod that adds its own dose of disharmonic murk to the mix. And the ability to switch between the aliasing-rich MW1 mode and the smoother MW2 mode, which brings with it a bunch of XT-like digital filters. I wrote off these extra filters for a while, so enamored with the analog filter I was. But they actually complement the SSM filter well, both serving as a pre-filter tone shaper and also a way to boost the signal further into saturation through the SSM. A big shout goes out to Vladi S. for these. He has single-handedly been responsible for most if not all of the post-release OS updates and has gone above and beyond to make what was already an incredible machine incroyable.

And can I take a moment to talk about the pan. It's a simple feature that's been around since the Wave/Microwave, but on the M is very easy to access and I find even the simplest basic wave patch suddenly becomes alive with some LFO-driven panning, becoming a phase-friendly stereo tremolo effect. Chorus? We don't need no stinkin' chorus (I'm sure I've used that phrase before.. I'll probably use it again FYI). 

Now, it's not a cover-all-bases perfect synth. Snappy basses, hyperleads, and grinding FM subs, look elsewhere. But for most of the trad synth sounds you can think of, and then a million others that you can't because they haven't landed on Earth yet, it's wonderful. And more importantly, the thing just bleeds character—a real, distinct character—in a way that very few synths ever have. And in a way that certainly no previous PPG or Waldorf synths have. In this world full of identical wavetables they've managed to shift the primary focus away from the waves (maybe the M actual stands for miraculous?). One final tip: add the expensive but totally worth it 8-voice extension. You'll be adrift in droney twilight-tinged pad heaven until the cows come home.