Waldorf Crema packs strings, wavetables and FM into a €345 box
The compact desktop synth draws on the Streichfett and combines two engines with a shimmer reverb and 130-plus factory sounds.
Waldorf’s Crema is a €345.45 desktop synthesizer with two engines: Texture, which covers string-machine tones, wavetables and FM across 24 sound types, and Lines, an eight-voice virtual-analog synth. It is available now.
The Crema builds on the architecture of Waldorf’s Streichfett and goes beyond string-machine sounds. Lines has two detunable oscillators, sawtooth or pulse, plus vibrato, stereo tremolo and pulse-width modulation. The string section has orchestral-style string and ensemble timbres, and Streichfett Ensemble processing can be applied to them. A Flavour control adds subtle variations in pitch and waveform position, so sustained sounds and repeated parts move without tweaking several parameters by hand.
The effects section has two processors with serial and parallel routing. They draw on chorus, flanger, phaser, tremolo, drive, delay and reverb, and a dedicated shimmer reverb sits alongside them.
Waldorf ships more than 130 factory sounds from sound designers including Christian Kleine and LimbicBits. There are 360 preset slots, and the Chutney Librarian app organizes sounds and transfers them between the Crema and a computer.
The unit measures about 252 × 170 × 48 mm, weighs 0.9 kg and runs on USB-C power. It has MIDI over USB, MIDI in and out, stereo audio outputs and a headphone connection. It supports MPE, and the two engines can receive MIDI on separate channels.
Loopop’s Ziv Eliraz has published an in-depth review and tutorial covering how the engines work, how their sounds blend and how modulation and effects shape the raw sources.
