NAMM 2010 (MuseWire) – Waldorf has announced the latest version of their LARGO virtual instrument, which is built on the legacy of groundbreaking products like the PPG Wave, Waldorf Q, and the more recent Blofeld. 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.

According to the company: “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.”

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.

Largo’s 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.

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.

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.