The Blofeld is really easy programmable. It’s just the fact that he can do very much, that’s why multiple pages are needed. The Octatrack has for every button multiple functions, but only because the insane amount of possibilities. With the Blofeld you always know where you are, and the matrix used is IMO the best way to control everything without the need of hundreds of buttons (which would cost lots of money). I say buy one, you won’t regret it. If you have a Octatrack too, it’s like heaven. Perfect for Pads, Plucks, Atmosphere, FX, and even for bass! I have a lot of much more expensive synths but the Blofeld is still one of my favourites!
I just „wasted“ four hours laying on my bed with a Keystep and my Blofeld and created new patches with my newly created wavetables, not even my Virus can load custom wavetables! And i have not even started to talk about the FM possibilities, which are awesome!
thanks for looking - this makes me wonder if that developer just decided to morph the in between steps or whether the Blofeld does indeed need that (this makes more sense) - the confusion is that it’s theoretically possible to do the interpolation in synthesis (the one I was creating for was all created in Cycling 74’s Max/MSP and the iPhone app sent touch data by wifi which max used to create open gl renderings for an interface) - as I recall it, the thing that made it interesting was the polyphonic modulation of wave table position and the wavetables themselves
wavetables are what makes the Blofeld come alive for me - dynamics/modulation control affecting timbre in interesting ways
I would say … there is a better way to approach this. The wavetables of the Virus are simple compared to the Blofeld. The Virus seems to have about 4 to 7 different waveforms per wavetable, Waldorf has 64. If we set the “interpolation” parameter on the Virus to “127”, we can listen to the single waveshapes. IMO the strength of the Virus is the granular/formant like oscillators.
The Blofeld reads wavetables as special *.mid files, which can be created according to:
Serum can export single waveforms as *.wav, but I haven’t found a software to get this to Blofeld. At least we can re-paint the waveforms in the utilities for Blofeld. Maybe we find together a better way. It would be great to have Serum importing audio, exporting wavetables and using them on Blofeld. Technically we might find a procedure.
the polyphonic modulation of wave table position and the wavetables themselves
That’s genius! A wavetables that can be modulated, sounds like the future generation of Wavetable synthesis! I hope one day there will be a hardware that can even modulate the wavetables itself! Elektron i looking at you
Had a dig around in the Blofeld today re the wavetables, for the sake of sharing the wavetables are a set of 64 waves - if packaged as sysex these are 64 x 410 bytes long (384 of the 410 is for the ‘wave’ data and the rest is setting up sysex, name, wave slot in Blofeld and wave position in table stack ) So with 128 samples per wave it’s 3 bytes per sample sent as a 21 bit signed value which means the data ranges from -(2^20) > ((2^20)-1)
I’m not yet sure if the Blofeld needs all 64 of these waves sent or whether it’ll interpolate between those sent at selected marked positions in the stack; not needing to interpolate would make it much simpler to create wavetable sets
What’s really evident to me in any case is that the Blofeld inspires me for certain arrangements of wavetables and this has made me determined to continue developing this - I’m needing more of those ‘wavetrip’ type wavetables - the only slightly disappointing aspect is that the waves in the tables are all only 128 samples long, so it’s quite coarse (when i’d done a wave table ‘synth’ before the tables could work with waves of sample length 256 through to 4096) but to be honest, I think it’s the character you get from 128 sample waves that makes the timbre appealing and I always dial up the Brilliance parameter to emphasise the crunchiness
One thing I do not like about the Blofeld is the knob feel, it’s geared a bit slow and the super smooth shiny knobs always feel slippy - the other thing that’s hard to get used to is that some parameters will only be audible when you re-trigger a new note - I’m used to changing parameters and hearing the effect instantly
One thing i’d add is that the samples feel super slick compared to the wavetables, but I like the sound design possibilities of the wavetable side more - the Blofeld does a sort of ‘polyphonic’ modulation as you can tie velocity to wavetable position, so a cluster of notes can sound very nice as they’ll have differing timbres and may vary every time you play the same notes - before you contemplate further modulations … great synth and one of only a handful that offer logic operations which are unbelievably powerful btw
Could you elaborate as to which parameters are these?
I mean it’s not that hard to get around it but sometimes you don’t want to re-trigger notes and just keep the sound droning while changing parameters and recording audio. Have been eyeing Blofeld since I owned microQ ages ago and have been considering to get it for the wavetables, etc.
Well, I agree that there’s advantages both ways and it’s also nice to have a series of notes hanging which have all started life as different voices
It seems to be the main things like Oscillator selection and filter type (both of which are dynamic on most other synths I have) - even if you have a wavetable on a voice, you can’t vary the wavetable selected once the voice has started, the voice has to be stolen (or decay) eventually - there may be more as I found this quite obstructive in the past - but the modulation table is live once a note is playing, so there’s probably less than I recalled, but FM Source is cast when the note starts (but not PWM/Pan source) - Filter Drive type is also set until the next note, as is the Brilliance parameter - so sometimes it can be disconcerting to be playing whilst tweaking as parameter changes make no difference
It’d be good to see a list of all the parameters fixed at voice start, might search for that
Thank you! A list would definitely be nice find! From what I understand it’s more of such parameters which are changing type/source/etc. so that wouldn’t really bother me too much. Osc type not being possible to change while sustaining a note probably bother me the most
Just for completeness relating to posts above - Wavetables seem to need to be complete packages of 64 - you can’t just send waypoints and expect the Blofeld to fill in the gaps by interpolating (as was apparently possible on older Waldorfs)
The Blofeld takes 64 waves ( and given there are 128 positions for modulation) … it seems to blend/mix in between - so the actuals waves are in even ‘Pulsewidth’ positions and the odds are formed in the box
No surprises there. The Blofeld got a bad rep from the start largely because of firmware issues. The LFOs and arp would not sync to MIDI clock and it took Waldorf years to fix it.
They are charging €100 to activate a sample waveform option which is built into the synth, ( a questionable practice in itself) but there have been problems with it. At some point they released firmware v1.23 and it made things worse so they pulled it down. It’s been a mess. No way would I touch any firmware updates for my Blofeld, it works fine with v1.22.
It’s an amazing synth for the price and I really like the build and the stainless steel knobs, but some people don’t… I thought it did good bass sounds until I compared to an analogue synth in the context of a mix. . .
There will be a next OS version soon. I experience some functional problems with a brand new Blofeld. In the Waldorf forum is a thread about the issue. God news, Waldorf took note, has already detected a bug and promises to start fixing it.
TBH … as weird as my little black box is now, I will keep it. If that issue is fixed, it will have a regular role in my projects.
Is it reasonable to compare digitone to blofeld?
I’ve pre ordered digitone but willing to look at blofeld. Plan to use with OT2
Blofeld multi Timbral, deep
Digitone sequencer, immediate
Appreciate opinions!
Cheers
I have both. They do share their general sound signature (brightness !). Otherwise, completely different beasts… obviously the Elektron sequencer and UI wins at immediate results.
