Winter 1993 - The PPGs

By late 1992/early 1993 there was still a part of me that thought that a career in music was a possibility, and I crafted a plan: What I really needed was a decent mixing board, a multitrack ADAT, and a good effect unit. I came up with a budget of $6500 for the project, and approached my dad for a loan. This was actually the first time I had decided to ask: Up to then I'd been able to work and save for each piece of gear - $500 here, $1000 there. But a big investment like this... I needed some help. He gave the money willingly, though with the caveat that this is the last of it - what I did next would need to fund itself.

What happened next was absolutely brilliant and idiotic at the same time. Not one day after depositing those funds, I picked up the CityPages and saw in the classifieds "PPG Synth - Call for Details". I couldn't not call. The PPG. The legend.

The PPG was one of the first digital synths on the market in the early 1980s, but with an analog filter. It had a brittle, digital tone, but was very distinctive. The opening to "The Politics of Dancing" was very PPG. Most of Propaganda's "A Secret Wish" album was PPG. PPG was the sound all over Depeche Mode's "A Broken Frame". Nothing sounded quite like a PPG, and nothing still does. Plus, it was GERMAN, and RARE, and BLUE.

So I called. I was... I wasn't thinking. I had a plan for that money, I really did. But I called. And I went out to meet this guy.

He had a beautiful recording studio a block away from Paisley Park - he and his brother were a band I'd never heard of called "BroJo" (after "The Brothers Johnson" - but not the funky ones who worked with Quincy Jones). They got a recording contract and a big advance, plowed it into gear, and never went anywhere, and apparently started renting out their studio and gear to jingle artists. It was a gorgeous facility with just a hint of "starting to get run down" about it. And this guy was talking a mile a minute, too. He led me into the gear room, and I couldn't believe my eyes.

TWO PPG Wave 2.3 synths, a PRK FD Master Keyboard, AND a Waveterm B computer. This was the full PPG system worth well over $40,000 just 8 years earlier, a serious competitor to the Fairlight and Synclavier. And he had it all. And it all WORKED.

And I could take it all home for $6000.

Oh man. What a choice. Be responsible, get the Mackie 24/8 mixer, get the ADAT, get the Lexicon, actually have a studio where I could do more than "press play and lay it to DAT". Or blow the money on a dream synth system from 8 years earlier with a horrible reputation for reliability, manuals in German, and no support.

I don't need to tell you that I crammed that gear into the car, wrote him a check, and raced home, my mind full of justifications, of rationalizations, about how somehow just somehow, this gear would be JUST AS USEFUL in my long term plans as the recording gear... oh yes.... why did I even WANT that recording gear anyway? If I needed to, i could just rent time in a place like BroJo. Yeah, the music I'll be writing with this PPG system will be incredible. Plus, the gods must WANT me to have this, to have the ad appear RIGHT when I could afford it...

It was like Jack trading the cow for magic beans. And I knew the beans were magic. I had no regrets. My dad rolled his eyes. Pamela (my then-girlfriend, now wife) was excited by the blue things, and happy that I was happy.

I got a new Ultimate Support stand for the whole system, which rose up the wall, with one synth almost vertical. The glowing green screen of the Waveterm was comforting. I loaded up sample disks (5 1/4" floppies) and heard sounds I had heard before on records - very distinctive choirs and strings, punchy drums, and a stand up bass that was very very playable. I had a wonderful month with them - recorded several songs with the PPG as the main sound source, got to know their inner workings....

But the bloom was coming off the rose just a bit: The PRKFD didn't actually do anything that the manual said it did. All it did was send Midi notes. You could click the keypad all you wanted, and it wouldn't change what it did. The Waveterm was actually a user-hostile system, that despite having a full screen, still insisted that you communicate with it using unlabeled "soft keys" that changed function depending on the screen, and used cryptic acronyms (of GERMAN terms) for everything. I never got it to do several key things... like sample, or sequence. It let you build your own waveforms and wavetables, but everything I made sounded either like a flute, or a flute through a distortion pedal.

And then they started failing. It was a mere 6 months into ownership when one of the Waves decided to go dark. I brought it to The Good Guys, my repair shop, and 2 weeks and $250 later, it was fixed. A blown capacitor. 3 months later, the OTHER wave went dark. The Good guys fixed it. And so it went for the next 4 years: Every four-six months, one or the other would fail, and the Good guys would get $250 (or more) to fix it. They got over $2000 of my money that way, those crafty PPGs. And you really couldn't argue it.

Alas, I knew this going in: The PPG was a notoriously unreliable beast: They failed Depeche Mode in concert. Everybody who had one needed another for a hot spare. The inside was basically a computer with three big cards plugged into it, and the cards came loose over time - it was common to drop a PPG to reseat the cards! It was like having british sports car - a rich man's folly.

After the PPGs, there really wasn't anywhere I could go with the vintage gear - maybe a Fairlight... but that would have been at least $4k back then, and my money was spent. The PPGs were the last hurrah of my vintage phase. I had everything I could have wanted - a Jupiter 8, a Linndrum, a Simmons SDS7 kit, a TX816, a PPG system, a MemoryMoog, an OB8, and the Rhodes Chroma... And it was all running through my Mackie line mixers, sequenced by my Mac, using Performer...

It was a good setup, and I wrote a hell of a lot of music with it. And by 1998 when the studio fell, I had got my money's worth out of the gear. The PPGs wound up selling for a bit more than I paid in 1993, but less if you factor in all of the repairs - I think it was $7500 all told, and they had recently been serviced, so I hope the owner got some good use out of them. I'm sure the Good Guys knuckled back a tear...

In 2000, Wolfram Franke of Waldorf (which continued the PPG tradition) created a "Virtual PPG" plug in for the computer. And to my ears it sounded amazing - JUST like the PPG I remembered. And the PPG sound appeared again in a lot of my music... for a while. But it kept refusing to blow a capacitor, and it only cost $400 total, and I never had to drag it to the Good Guys... so the experience wasn't completely authentic.

As a coda, I decided to look up BroJo, and the only mention out there is "Three Charged in Hazardous Waste Fire - BroJo Sound Studios" under the category "Disaster - Fire" in the annals of the Carver County Historical Society. I don't think it's worth the $3 for the article reprint however...