Wolfgang Palm (born 1950) is a German musician and inventor who was the founder and owner of Palm Products GmbH (PPG) and the inventor and creator of various pioneering technical designs for analog and digital

synthesizers A synthesizer (also spelled synthesiser) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and ...

. He is widely acknowledged as the father of

digital synthesis A digital synthesizer is a synthesizer that uses digital signal processing (DSP) techniques to make musical sounds. This in contrast to older analog synthesizers, which produce music using analog electronics, and samplers, which play back digital ...

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 (male), (female) en, Hamburger(s), Hamburgian(s) , timezone1 = Central (CET) , utc_offset1 = +1 , timezone1_DST = Central (CEST) , utc_offset1_DST = +2 , postal ...

. His namesake corporation began operating as early as 1975, manufacturing

modular synthesizer Modular synthesizers are synthesizers composed of separate modules for different functions. The modules can be connected together by the user to create a patch. The outputs from the modules may include audio signals, analog control voltages, o ...

s in small numbers for

electronica Electronica is both a broad group of electronic-based music styles intended for listening rather than strictly for dancing and a music scene that started in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the term is mostly used to r ...

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 digitally controlled oscillators instead of the voltage controlled oscillators that his 1002 synthesizer and all other analog synthesizers of that time were using. He also created 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. The sounds in the PPG Wave inspired other manufacturers of digital synthesizers, such as

Sequential Circuits Sequential is an American synthesizer company founded in 1974 as Sequential Circuits by Dave Smith. In 1978, Sequential released the Prophet-5, the first programmable polyphonic synthesizer; it became a market leader and industry standard, use ...

and

Ensoniq Ensoniq Corp. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid-1980s and 1990s for its musical instruments, principally Sampler (musical instrument), samplers and synthesizers. Company history In spring 1983, former MO ...

. 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.

References

"Palm Productions GmbH (PPG)"
Synth Museum website
"PLEX restructuring Synthesizer by Steinberg and Wolfgang Palm as yet unheard of"
crmav.com
The 10 greatest synthesizers of all time
'' Music Radar''

External links

Official website

Wave 2.2
PPG website
PLEX 2
{{DEFAULTSORT:Palm, Wolfgang German male musicians Living people 1950 births Inventors of musical instruments