Waldorf's Blofeld synthesizer rolls into Musikmesse delivering the sounds you'd come to expect from a Waldorf engine inside a full metal chassis. The Blofeld is just as capable of producing warm analog sounds associated with their Q synthesizer line as it is with sweet synthesis from the on-board wavetable engine. Waldorf's synthesis nods to revolutionary PPG Wave synths of the early 80s.

The Blofeld offers three oscillators with authentic circuit-models of analog waveforms including Pulse [with variable pulse-width], sawtooth, triangle and sine waves. Oscillators 1 and 2 feature wavetables from the Waldorf Q and Micro Q series synths. Furthermore, all the ROM Wavetables from the Waldorf Wave and Microwave II/XT are inside as well as the requested "Upper Wavetable" from the PPG Wave. What's unique to both Waldorf and PPG is that each oscillator can have its own wavetable.

The first two oscillators can also be ring modulated, and a noise generator adds extra white noise that can be low or high pass filtered. The Blofeld has a pair of multimode filters per voice. Route them parallel or in series and pan them any way you'd like. In addition to low pass and high pass filters, you've also got band pass and notch filters. Comb filters can fatten up your bass and pad sounds or create percussion, string or flute-like sounds.

Behind each filter, you have your share of "Drive" features to work with. You've got the standards from the Q and Micro Q; low. medium and hard saturation; tube saturation; two types of electric pickups; a rectifier; and more excuses for me to overuse semicolons. There are also a couple of effects slots. The first of these offers modulation effects like chorus, flanger and strange combinations of mod effects. The next slot offers all that plus delay and reverb.

With the Blofeld, there are four envelopes that can either be polyphonic or single trigger. Types range from your standard ADSR and variants as well as loop envelopes and something called the "one shot" envelope which is meant for percussion sounds.

The LFO system in the Blofeld also offers a lot including synchronization to MIDI clock. In addition they can be polyphonic or monophonic, and LFOs have separate delay and fade parameters. Another important feature with Blofeld's LFOs is the fact that higher rates reach well into audio frequency range so they can be used as either linear or logarithmic FM sources.

The real power of Waldorf shines through with the Modulation Matrix. You can connect dozens of sources to sound generation parameters including pulsewidths, waveforms, FM modulation amounts, filter cutoff and resonance and more. You can "modulate the modulators" or let the sources modulate themselves. Waldorf suggests modulating an envelope rate with the same envelope. Factor in sixteen freely definable slots and the destinations that have already been routed for you [pitch, Osc 1-3, etc], and you get a total of 33 simultaneous connections.

Finally, the arpeggiator on the Blofeld features variable clock divisions from 64th note triplets to over one thousand bars. It has a ten octave range, selectable note ordering and a choice between Hold or One-Shot. Not to mention, Waldorf threw in a powerful Pattern Editor that they claim is unrivaled.

You can set the arpeggiator to play either its normal note, rest, or play any note in the sequence or a number of notes in the sequence. You can change accents, turn Glide on or off, and make each note as staccato or legato as you wanna.

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