MusicRadar

Largo is full of wavetable wizardry.

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• Review

Waldorf recently emerged from a brief hiatus with a new line of hardware synths that draws heavily upon its older instruments. This would be news enough for synthesizer aficionados, but the recent announcement of a virtual variant carrying the Waldorf name adds even more excitement.

Overview

Largo presents a familiar character. It's a cross-platform VST and AU plug-in, with each of the synth's four layers sporting a five-oscillator structure (if you include the sub oscillators). The third oscillator is a fairly standard virtual analogue model, with saw, sine, pulse (including PWM) and triangle waves available.

More interesting are oscillators 1 and 2, which offer 68 wavetables culled from the Wave, MicroWave, Q and Blofeld hardware synths. These wavetables can be modulated dynamically, and oscillator sync is available. Noise (with adjustable colour) and ring modulation are on hand, and you can dial in FM between the oscillators and noise generator.

Adjustable key-tracking is provided as well – crucial for far-out FM excursions and atonal effects. Unison and glide are on tap, too.

Waldorf's hardware is known for its exceptional digital filters, and Largo does nothing to tarnish that reputation. You get a pair of multimode numbers that can be arranged in serial or parallel paths. There are 12dB and 24dB variants, and the resonance can be driven into self-oscillation. If that's not enough, you can engage the Drive function for some serious grit.

"Waldorf's hardware is known for its exceptional digital filters, and Largo does nothing to tarnish that reputation."

Modulation is offered in the form of a trio of syncable LFOs, with the usual complement of sine, square, saw, triangle, random and sample-and-hold waveforms. The quartet of envelope generators is slightly less pedestrian, with four- and seven-stage varieties available, half of them loopable – looping envelopes are especially cool when used to sweep through a wavetable.

Two of the envelopes are hardwired to the amp and filter, but that doesn't preclude them from also being used as sources for the other 50+ destinations via the mod matrix. We were also pleased to see the individual envelope stages available as modulation targets.

A fully customisable and highly flexible arpeggiator is present. You get 16 steps to play with and can adjust accent, timing, note length and pauses. Up, down and alternate modes are provided and you can also sync the thing to incoming MIDI clock.

Each of the instrument's four layers can draw upon a pair of effects slots. You can choose from Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Overdrive, Delay and Reverb effects, though the latter two are only available to slot 2. The effects aren't anything to write home about, but they will add some gloss to your patches.