Two PPG Resources & the Realizer

Some discussion on AH regarding PPG resurfaced. Nothing new, just differences between the Wave 2, 2.2, 2.3 and the Realizer. Thought I'd put up a post to the PPG site, but I then realized there were two! Someone on the list posted to http://www.ppg.synth.net/. It looked familiar but there were a bunch of pictures I haven't seen before, and oddly, I didn't see the PPG Realizer on the site. I searched for the PPG Realizer and found the following site http://www.antarcticamedia.com/ppg/index.htm. That's the site I remember. Anyway, both are worth checking out.

The image below is the PPG Realizer which never made it to market. It would have been the first VA back in 1986, nearly 10 years prior to the first official VA, the Nord Lead in 1995. BTW, it's hard to see but the wireframe synth in the monitor below is the Moog Minimoog. It was one of the featured models.



"An impressive exhibit from PPG was the Realizer (about $50,000). This consists of software versions of familiar synthesizer configurations. It allows you to design your own analog, FM digital, and sampled sounds, patch any of the components of one instrument into another instrument, and then sequence or sample the resulting sound. Wolfgang Palm, designer of the Realizer and head of PPG Instruments, earns the the quote-of-the-show award for explaining how he designed it: 'I copied the circuit diagrams into software.' No easy task."

Update: also see this post for one that went up for sale and links to Wolfgang Palm's notes on the history of the synth and PPG.