Date: Sun, 11 Feb 96 14:58:02 PST From: "Cord Mueller" Subject: _/\_ Pulse During my stay in Germany I also had the chance to play with Waldorfs newest toy, the Pulse. First impression: I saw it and I had to tweak it. It has 6 knobs and a couple of buttons. The color is the same like the uwave but still there is only a 3 charakter display. What can I say, the matrix on the panel shows it all (kind of uwave style). Next to the display there are the sources and destinations of the modmatrix. Some technical features: 3 OSC, Noise, Mixer, VCF, VCA, Panning, 2 LFOs, 2 ENVs, Global parameter and MODmatrix!!!! However, the 3rd Oscillator has sawtooth and square only. You can sync or crossmodulate it with Oscillator 2. The LFO is really luxereous but the 2nd one has triangle only. However, therefore the rate goes up to audio range. You can connect up to 15 mod sources with destinations via matrix modulation. There are also some hardwired connections already (reminds me alot of the Matrix6). How does it sound? 3 Oscillators are really fat. Nothing static even the Oscillators should be DCO, but this I really don't know. It does sound fat and bassy. The filter is moogish. I will not say 100% Moog, but still the sound gets thinner with cranked up rez. The selfoscillation does sound good to me. It is very clean. Did I mentioned that the filter can be overdriven when high parameter in the mixer page are choosen. The envelopes are fine, like the uwave and PPG envelopes: very fast!!! I haven't enough time to check out the whole unit, specially not the midi stuff. However, it made a really good impression. The pages with 6 knobs are really niffty and also to have a second page, sorry here a shift page, makes the whole unit very userfriendly. Sure it can be better, but with all these features you would have half a Wave! However, the only thing I really didn't like is the amount of the filterenvelope. I don't know if you can double the amount over the Matrix modulation but with only one modulation connection it does not sound that punchy. Otherwise everything seemed to work fine. It really sounds fat analog and with the midi feature, modmatrix and the panning you get really nice effect or lead sounds out of it. Cord