Waldorf Music has announced Crema, a compact hardware synthesizer built specifically for string ensembles, pads, and slowly evolving textures rather than the leads and basslines most small synths chase. It’s a spiritual sequel to Waldorf’s long-running Streichfett budget string machine, but with a texture engine and polyphony that Streichfett never had.
Two engines, one job
Crema splits its sound generation into two parts. The Texture engine covers 24 sound types spread across Strings, Wavetables, and FM, running at 12-voice FM polyphony — this is where the ensemble pads and slow-moving textures live. The Lines engine is an 8-voice virtual-analog layer built around two detunable pulse or saw oscillators, meant for the more conventional analog-style layer underneath a pad. A Flavour control adds small amounts of pitch and waveform drift across voices, aiming for the slightly-out-of-tune character that makes a real string section sound alive instead of static.
Both engines share a step sequencer and arpeggiator that sync to an external clock, dual effects (chorus, flanger, phaser, tremolo, drive, delay) plus a separate reverb with an optional Shimmer mode, and MPE support over USB and mini-TRS MIDI. The unit ships with over 130 factory sounds across 360 preset slots, managed through a free companion app called Chutney Librarian. At 252 × 170 × 48mm and 0.9kg, it’s sized for a desktop rather than a studio console — USB-C powered, with stereo outs and a headphone jack.
Why the lineage matters
Streichfett has stayed in Waldorf’s lineup for over a decade on the strength of one idea: a cheap, dedicated string machine is more useful to a working musician than a general-purpose synth asked to fake strings as one patch among a thousand. Crema keeps that premise but stops pretending the category has to stay simple — wavetable and FM synthesis inside a “string synth” is new territory for Waldorf, and the dual-engine layout lets a player stack a textural pad under a more rhythmic analog line without reaching for a second instrument.
Waldorf hasn’t published pricing or a ship date yet; the product page went live October 29 with full specs and an FAQ but no store listing.