The question is, how lust-worthy is it today? Modeling, sampling, and FM soft synths are plentiful and cheap, but computers typically aren’t known for being tight, integrated, instantly fun-to-play performance axes. Fire engine-red slabs with “Nord” on them are, however, and the Wave lives up to this legacy, with bells on. Still, it isn’t the only hardware keyboard that can combine virtual analog and sampled sounds in the same patch, so let’s dig more deeply into what makes it unique.
OVERVIEW
The Wave’s personality is clearly more virtual analog than sampler or workstation. It looks and handles like a virtual analog synth, stealthily caching most of its sample-based abilities in oscillator 2. You could take it to some analog-nut keyboard event, play a concerto on a grand piano patch, and probably finish before anyone got hip.
That’s not to diminish its sample-playback power, which is formidable. The big deal here is that while the Wave comes preloaded with some excellent samples courtesy of Sonic Reality and Kirk Hunter (try “Bjorn Again” for a piano/cello layer you won’t be able to stop playing), you can replace some or all of them with ones that you import via USB and the capable Nord Wave Manager software (see “Wave Manager” on page 50). Technically, the Wave isn’t a sampler, as it doesn’t record audio or have onboard sample editing — you get WAV files into it by importing.
Approximately 185MB, while small by soft sampler standards, is generous sample memory for a keyboard. Even though Clavia’s intention is for you to use samples more as “wet synthesis clay” than for straight-up emulations, you’ve got room enough to load up sounds that dwarf the factory presets on most all-around workstations and stage pianos. True, the Wave’s 18 stereo voices of polyphony is more in the virtual analog league than the sampling workstation one, but it is dynamically allocated, meaning that the Wave ties up only what it really needs at a given instant.
Where workstation keyboards use RAM for user-loadable samples, the Wave uses flash ROM, like the kind in digital camera cards. So, even though it’s re-writable, everything stays put when you power off, and there’s no waiting for samples to reload when you power on. I’m not aware of any other current keyboard that does this.
The Wave is always in two-part polytimbral mode, in that each sound program has two “slots,” though many factory programs only use one. Each slot consists of a full two-oscillator patch with all associated panel settings except for the reverb, delay, and “tube” overdrive, which are shared by both slots. You can layer the slots, but oddly, there’s no way to assign a slot to either half of a simple keyboard split. Since you can choose each slot’s MIDI channel, though, you could hook up an inexpensive MIDI keyboard devoted to slot B. In an undocumented feature, you can also copy the current slot to any other — hold down the slot button and rotate the dial.
Instead of the Nord Lead 3’s endless encoders with position-indicating LED “halos,” the Wave has the plain-Jane knobs of the Lead 2X and Electro. Clavia says that endless encoders would have added about $500 to its list price.
SOUND ENGINE
As you read what follows, remember the Wave’s dual-slot design, and say “times two” to yourself after each section. You could think of the Wave as a four-oscillator, dual-filter synthesizer that saves on knobs (though it’s got plenty).
Oscillators. When its six-way mode button is set to SAMP, oscillator 2 is the primary home of sample playback in the Wave, and its LED dial chooses from among the factory multisamples as well as anything you’ve imported. Apart from this, oscillator 1’s WAVE setting (not to be confused with the WAV files that live in the SAMP bank) contains 62 short sampled waveforms similar to those in ’80s digital synths such as the Prophet-VS and Korg DW8000. Clavia threw these in to give you even more sonic clay; tonally, they range from Hammond-like to pipe organ-like to nasal and robotic. Oscillator 1 also has a MISC mode, which at this time is just for a noise signal — I’d prefer a separate noise knob that didn’t tie up an oscillator. Oscillator 2 includes a bank called SWAV filled with 22 more acoustic samples. Their quality is nowhere near that of the SAMP bank, as they’re meant for mangling, not realism.
If all this makes you think the Wave is entirely a sample-playback synth, fear not. Sawtooth, triangle, and variable pulse waves have their spots on each oscillator’s mode button, and like on Nords past, they’re modeled, not sampled.
There’s a lot more going on with FM than a glance at the panel reveals. Each oscillator can be a self-contained, two-operator FM synth, with its LED dial selecting from 18 frequency ratios. Turning up the oscillator’s Shape knob increases the FM amount or feedback. In musical terms, that means harmonics get louder and sometimes raspier in relation to the fundamental. Independent of all this is the “Osc Mod” section. There, oscillator 2 can modulate either the phase or the frequency of oscillator 1, whatever modes or waves are in use. A little bit is great for, say, imprinting the pluck from a sampled guitar onto an analog waveform; a lot means you’ll have to address Janet as “Miss Jackson.”
Filter. Doing justice to the oscillators got me going in a tech-speak direction, and I feel a backlash coming on: The Wave’s filter can slam your ass while taking the top of your head off. It can be incredibly musical and warm, or dish out bleeding-ear aggression, in either case rivaling the authenticity of filters on real analog synths. How smooth is it? I stepped through all of its modes, swept the cutoff and resonance, and octave-shifted the keyboard to the point where dogs in the next county howled in pain. Even so, I couldn’t coax any hint of aliasing, zipper noise, or other digital telltales out of it. Outstanding.
Its modes include the expected lowpass, highpass, and bandpass (listen closely to the beginning of Robert Palmer’s “I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On,” for a great example of a bandpass synth). Not as expected, 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 re-order 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. Whether trying to create a sound I hear every detail of in my head, or whether I’m in that “I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I hear it” mood, this is a very, very good thing. Heck, it’s what infatuated me with synthesizers in the first place.
This is usually the part where I mention things I wish an instrument had, but doesn’t, so here goes: Audio inputs (not necessarily for onboard sampling, but for processing external signals through the Wave’s filters in real time), a vocoder, and maybe one or two more pedal inputs would round out the otherwise extensive performance features.
CONCLUSIONS
The Nord Wave tempts comparison to one other recent hardware synth: Roland’s V-Synth GT (reviewed Sept. ’07) is similarly-priced, offers two “tones” per program which are a lot like the Wave’s “slots,” can combine virtual analog and sampled sounds in the same patch, and lets you bring in your own samples. Both specialize in expressive live performance and sound design, and neither are intended as first keyboards for your first bar band.
The most important difference between the two is that if the way you play samples centers on realtime rhythmic manipulation, e.g. time-stretching, the Wave isn’t your axe. If you’d rather use samples as an ingredient in yet-unimagined hybrid sounds, it most certainly is. If you want pristine instrument sounds (from an ultra-portable keyboard that’s also a world-class virtual analog synth, no less), the Wave is as good as the samples you load into it, and nothing you can prop on a keyboard stand — nothing — has the Wave’s heapin’ helpin’ of non-volatile sample memory.
If certain concrete specs or features are a must, visiting a manufacturer’s website will tell you if a keyboard has them. It’s harder to describe an instrument’s personality, but it’s what you’ll continue to love or hate long after forgetting the spec sheet. Where the V-Synth is user-friendly but in-yer-face high-tech at the same time (kind of like the Picard-era Enterprise), the Nord Wave has a more artisan quality. It brings sampling to the knob-laden retro table at such a low profile that at first you don’t realize how darned powerful this baby is. If you’re in the market for a true synthesist’s syntheiszer, I strongly urge you to get your ears around a Nord Wave.
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 eerie-sounding pad with lots of internal motion.
GORY DETAILS
USER SAMPLE MEMORY
185MB non-volatile flash ROM.
SAMPLE FORMATS IMPORTED
44.1kHz WAV only, 16- and 24-bit files supported.
EFFECTS
Chorus, 2-band EQ, reverb, tube overdrive simulation, and stereo delay with tap tempo (all effects available simultaneously).
CLAIM CHECK
Jason Stanfield, product manager for Nord USA, says, “The Nord Wave really highlights something which I’ve taken for granted in virtual analog synths: the potential of a subtractive environment. Analog oscillators provide the essentials for creating classic synth sounds, but have limited harmonic content from which to sculpt a particular patch; sawtooth-based leads or square wave pads only go so far. Within the Wave though, adding raw FM, wavetable, and sampled sounds provides a greater initial mass of harmonic and textural material from which to subtract. I have a ton of great sample libraries, so I’m really excited about being able to load samples in WAV format into a Nord synthesizer — affecting them with the Wave’s broad parameter ranges, using the Wave’s morphing in interesting ways, and exploring new carrier/modulator relationships. I really think that, since the Wave exists outside the realm of cookie-cutter ROMplers, it can become a far more personalized musical instrument than many sample-based keyboards available today.”