One of pop and hip-hop’s most renowned producers, Mike Dean has a discography that could make even the most successful hitmaker drool, having worked with The Weeknd, Beyonce, Kanye West, Drake, Madonna and Jay-Z, among many others.
A gifted multi-instrumentalist, Dean is also a noted synthesizer aficionado, his productions laced with licks from an extensive collection of instruments that includes classics such as the Oberheim OB-X, the Memorymoog and the very same Yamaha CS-80 used on Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
His studio may already contain more sought-after vintage synths than many of us will get to play in our lifetime, but Dean’s collection is still growing, as he tells gear marketplace Reverb when they stopped by his studio this week.
In a video shared to Reverb’s YouTube channel, Dean revealed his latest purchase, a rare digital synth among his mostly analogue arsenal. This isn’t just any digital synth, however, but the PPG Wave 2.3, a historic instrument that Dean says is the “best piece of gear” he’s ever bought on Reverb.
“I’ve always never been interested in it because it’s a digital synthesizer, you know, with analogue filters,” Dean says. “Some friends of mine said ‘you should definitely have one of these in your arsenal’, so I started searching for one, started looking on Reverb and tried to find the cleanest-looking one.”
“Everybody in the ’80s had one of these. If you were a successful band that could afford it, you had a PPG Wave.” Dean auditions some of his own patches for viewers before praising the synth’s bright but gritty tone: “It doesn’t sound digital, right?”
The Wave may be digital, but its a digital synth from the early ’80s, not a sterile modern soft-synth: its low-resolution wavetables produce stepped waveforms and aliasing that create a distinctive and artefact-rich sound when run through its 12-bit DACs and analogue filters. “All the messed up shit is what makes it cool, you know?,” Dean says. “I’m so glad I got it, because it’s a very cool synth. It’s one of my favourites now.”
Released in 1981, the PPG Wave 2 was a pioneering synth that introduced the concept of wavetable synthesis, a technique that’s now relied upon by thousands of instruments across both hardware and software. Dean’s variant, the Wave 2.3, came out a few years later, doubling the oscillator count and adding 12-bit sampling and multitimbrality.
While a vintage PPG Wave will likely set you back north of $10,000 in 2026, there’s no shortage of options for synthesists looking to recreate its sought-after sound on a budget: Behringer‘s PPG Wave clone is available for a fraction of the price, and Waldorf makes a respectable software emulation if you’ve no space left in your studio.
If your pockets go a little deeper, Groove Synthesis’ 3rd Wave is a modernized homage to the Wave that we described as “one of the most powerful synths you could imagine” in our 2024 review.
