Many producers and synthesizer enthusiasts asked for a full-blown Waldorf Synthesizer for their virtual rack. We listened, and now we proudly present Largo. Largo is the first pure software synthesizer with Waldorf DNA. And again – it is the cutting edge sound that makes the big difference.

No wonder, as Largo mirrors the technology used in Blofeld and Q hardware synthesizers. As for every Waldorf instrument, ergonomics are a core feature on screen as well. Your eyes will be pleased with a clearly structured, graphical user interface that supports your workflow intuitively.

Largo offers three fat oscillators, two of them with sub oscillators. These oscillators include models of classic analog waveforms as well as a selection of waves from the PPG and Waldorf Wave stored in two Wavetables. All these run through two Waldorf multimode filters with steep cutoff, resonance up to self-oscillation and a drive stage to add even more punch and grainyness to the sound. Ultra-fast envelope generators and flexible LFOs as well as an easy to understand, yet extremely versatile modulation matrix make for a sound designer's dream.
The filters have always been a core part of any Waldorf instrument. With outstanding expertise in both analog and digital synthesis, our developers took utmost care in developing the filters. And you can hear a significant difference when working with a Waldorf filter - they just sound right! Use the comb filters for plucked, stringed or blown sounds. Band pass, high pass, low pass and notch filters are all available with 12 dB and 24 dB slope. All of them sound extremely accurate and add pure sonic quality to the sound of your music.

Largo contains a flexible arpeggiator with 16 freely programmable steps as known from the exclusive Q synthesizer line plus an array of high quality effects such as Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Overdrive, Delay and Reverb.

The clearly arranged user interface helps you to create your own powerful synthesizer sounds in a breeze. Oscillators and filters are always in direct access while the submodules are only a mouse click away. It has the same exclusive voice architecture as the Q and Blofeld synthesizer line, fully integrated into the total recall system of your Digital Audio Workstation.

Largo works as a VST and AudioUnit instrument.
 

New Sounds
Largo V1.5 comes with almost 500 new sounds. Together with the sounds shipping with earlier versions of Largo, this sums up to a total of more than 700 sounds (we have counted 733 so far). A lot of these new sounds take use of the new features of Largo. So, take a day off and carefully listen to the great library we ship with this update.

Browse
The most prominent feature of Largo V1.5 is its powerful Browse page. It is divided in two parts. On the left is a File Browser showing the files and folders of your sound libraries on your hard disk, on the right is a table showing the content of the currently loaded bank.

You can drag and drop sounds between the File Browser and the Program Manager for loading and saving, rearrange sounds on disk or in the current bank, copy and paste, and much more.

You can also drag and drop sounds from the file manager of your operating system (Windows Explorer or Macintosh Finder), or copy and paste selected sounds as a plain text list to a text editor for administrative work.

Search for sounds in the File Browser or Program Manager by typing in part of the name or category and let Largo find the stuff for you. In the File Browser, the search result is presented as a list while in the Program Manager the matching sound are highlighted and the non-matching ones are darkened.

Oscillator Section
By popular demand, we have added three additional parameters per Oscillator to allow finer control over their behaviour:
Startphase controls, as the name suggests, the phase with which the Oscillator starts. Set it to around 90° for a sharp attack, set all Oscillators to the same value to have them start in sync, or let the Oscillators run freely as they do in real analog synthesizers.

Brilliance controls different aspects depending on the Oscillator model used. On the Pulse and the Sawtooth waveform, it controls the mix of the discharge impulse of the capacitor, effectively resulting in a waveform with stronger high harmonics. With Wavetables, it controls their interpolation smoothness from perfect interpolation to steps. Those steps create additional harmonics especially in the lower keyboard ranges as they happened in the good old PPG Wave and the Waldorf Microwave and Wave.
Last but not least, the Limit parameter controls if the "analog" waveforms found at the end of most Wavetables are included into Wave Modulations or if they are left out. This helps creating wavetable scans without always keeping an eye of not hitting those accidentally.

Arpeggiator
The Arpeggiator now has the same power as the one found in Largos famous ancestors, the Waldorf Q, Micro Q and Blofeld. It offers various step types per step including fancy ones like Chord and Random. This means that you are not limited to either have an arpeggio or a chord repeater, you can have both depending on the step the arpeggiator is currently playing. And it now offers a separate Glide per step for your classic Bassline simulations.
 

Just look at the picture and you see that this pattern plays eight steps with different accents and lengths, and that in the bottommost row you see different symbols. Filled circles denote normally played steps, downward arrows tell the Arpeggiator to play the first note in its list, and the two-note-symbol results in a chord consisting of all currently held notes.

Chorus and other effects
Largos new Chorus comes in three flavours. The one with two stages you already know from earlier versions, and now also with four and six stages to create lush pads and strings. Spread controls the behaviour of the four additional stages, when set to zero, all six stages run in sync with a fix offset creating the ensemble effect of old string machines. When set higher, the modulation is increasingly decorrelated to make the Chorus thicker and wider. But we didn't stop here. We've also added Feedback to make the Chorus effect even thicker. And together with the quite long delay time, you can now abuse the Chorus as an additional Comb filter (as if the Largo hadn't enough of them already).

We are not stopping here. Also by popular demand, we added the selection of Delay and Reverb to the first effect slot. So, you can now create sounds with a Delay and Reverb at once. Or use two Reverbs, one set to a small room and the other to a large hall.

What else is new?
Besides fixing a number of bugs we have now tested Largo with the FXpansion VST2RTAS Wrapper in ProTools, added text input for almost all controls by double-clicking them, added scroll-wheel support for almost all controls, implemented system-wide copy and paste (not only between different Largo instances but even to other applications like a text editor) and, last but really not least, provide clock menus for all parameters that can be set to sync to incoming clock information. This menu contains the most often used entries so you can get your 16th Arpeggiator or dotted-8th Delay really quick.
 

Download Waldorf Largo VSTi v1.5.1