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3rd Wave User Manual
How to Sound Like a Vintage PPG
Choose the Right Envelope Settings
The next thing you will need to do is switch to the envelope shapes that
were used in the PPG. You can do this by pushing the “Misc” button
below the main display. This miscellaneous section holds parameters that
can be saved and changed per patch.
The second parameter, “Envelope Type” allows you to change the 3rd
Wave’s envelopes from “Exponential” to “PPG Shape.” The general
shape of the PPG envelopes is less exponentially curved than new
synthesizers. They were also designed to have longer attack, decay, and
release times than most other synthesizers.
Use “Key to Waves”
The PPG also had controls that allowed things to change as you moved
from the bottom to the top of the keyboard range. First is the PPG’s
“KW” control. This abbreviation stood for Key to Waves, and deter-
mined which note on the keyboard played which waveform in the
wavetable. The PPG provided 8 settings for KW (0-7). Since there are
64 waveforms and 61 notes on the keyboard, you can make the keyboard
play a different waveform offset in the wavetable on each note.
On the PPG this meant setting this control to a value of 4. If you go
above this on the PPG, you could actually skip more than one waveform
per note. On the 3rd Wave, all three oscillators have the “Key To Waves”
parameter. The main difference is that on the 3rd Wave, the parameter
has 128 settings (0-127). It does the same things as the KW parameter on
the PPG.
It is important to note that the way the PPG implemented the “Key To
Waves” function was actually in reverse key order and in reverse order
relative to the wavetable. So to be faithful to the PPG KW (key to wave)
control, make sure you set the
key to wave reverse parameter to on
(press soft button 2), so that the highest offset of the wavetable appears
at the bottom of the keyboard range and the lowest offset of the wavet-
able appears at the top of the keyboard range.
If you want a different waveform per note starting with 63 in the wave-
table and have the next lower offset in the wavetable play with each
higher note, then, just like the PPG, set the Key To Waves to the half way
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