A labor of love

35 years ago Waldorf Music released its first instrument, the Microwave, which took the hearts of the leading musicians and producers of the nineties by storm.

Now’s the time to bring back this magical instrument in a software form to the digital workstations of producers and musicians world- wide.

A multi-year effort and a labor of love which analyzed and modeled the original instruments down to the finest sonic details of every aspect of the hardware. Only the first generation of the Microwave and also the Waldorf Wave were based on a custom developed integrated circuit called the Waldorf ASIC. In combination with the legendary Curtis filter chips and a very unique 68k CPU based controller software the ASIC defined a very special flavor of wavetable sound unparalleled to none.

No one else than the inventor of Wavetable Synthesis of the eighties, Wolfgang Palm, helped to design this unique chip. Waldorf took a huge effort to analyze and recreate this integrated circuit within the plug-in. As the original, the plug-in runs the internal synthesis with the ultra high sampling rate of 250 kHz regardless of the DAW sampling rate. The recreated digital waveforms have been bit-by-bit compared with the original to be 100% identical.

The Waldorf Microwave 1 Plugin was painstakingly recreated from the original hardware with all its idiosyncrasies and wonderful singularities. A multi-year effort and a labor of love which analyzed and modeled the original instruments down to the finest sonic details of every aspect of the hardware.

A fully scalable modern interface with readable high-contrast fonts supports an intuitive sound editing process with many graphical representations of the wavetables, envelopes and filter response curves using animations for modulations and playing positions. The Microwave 1 was never as close as this under your finger tips. A joy to edit sounds with.