Wolfgang Palm

Wolfgang Palm (born 1950) was a founder and owner of Palm Products GmbH (PPG), and the inventor and creator of various pioneering technical designs for analog and digital synthesizers. He is widely acknowledged as the father of digital synthesis, and as a trendsetter in the use of computer technology in the making of electronic music. Palm's interest in synthesis technology began as a keyboardist in various local bands in his hometown of Hamburg, Germany. His namesake corporation began operating as early as 1975, manufacturing modular synthesizers in small amounts for electronica act Tangerine Dream and other musicians. Palm is arguably most famous for the invention of wavetable synthesis, a concept which he developed in the late 1970s when he created his Minimoog-like synthesizer - the 1020 - featuring DCO's instead of the VCO's his 1002 and all other analog synthesizers of that time were using - and the 360 Wavecomputer that would later become the renowned PPG Wave series. Palm's design was the impetus for the creation of the highly successful PPG Wave synthesizer, which was used by numerous bands throughout the 1980s and beyond. Today, nearly every digital synthesizer is in some way based on the concept of wavetable synthesizers. Wolfgang Palm was also one of the first people to experiment with data transmission systems for exchange of data between digital synthesizers and sequencers. His early design of an 8-bit parallel bus system was later abandoned and replaced by MIDI. After the decline of PPG, Wolfgang Palm continued to be an active innovator in the area of synthesizer technology. For Waldorf Music he designed the digital ASIC for the first Waldorf product Microwave (1989) which basically contained the complete sound engine of the PPG wave 2.2. Used by many professional artists (including Ace of Base and Depeche Mode), the Waldorf WAVE continues to be popular. The later Waldorf products like the MicroWave II, XT, Q, microQ, Blofeld all had all or several of the original wavetables and waveshapes of the PPG waves. In 2002, Steinberg released PLEX, a software synthesizer designed by Palm that wasn't sold by big numbers. Palm's influence on synthesis and electronic music is, undoubtedly, tremendous. The PPG wave's unique sound, and its use on the recordings of such a diverse range of artists is, arguably, responsible for the rise in popularity of digital synthesis in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Today, nearly every digital synthesizer implements wavetable synthesis in some form, and the wave's unique integration of analogue and digital circuitry influenced synthesizers such as the Monowave and the E-mu Emulator. His implementation of computer technology in sound creation was also ahead of its time. http://wolfgangpalm.com/index.html