Sorry for my hiatus from educational writing. I’ve been drawing things into the computer… a lot. This is our first animated video, done with Motion and Final Cut. Hope you enjoy. If you listen to the song, you will hear lots of synth programming. I used the ES2 in Logic, Massive, Absynth, and Operator to make most of the sounds. The drums were programmed in Battery and Kontakt.
I will now have some time to finish my series on synth programming!
As I get more and more into the electronic music and DJ world, I find that sites like djtechtools.com write a lot about being a producer and making your own music. There are a huge amount of excellent software synthesizers out there, ranging from the free plugins in Logic and Ableton to paid ones like Massive and Absynth from Native Instruments. I’ve never been a big fan of presets, mostly because of not wanting to have sounds like anyone else; so I spent an obscene amount of hours learning the ins and outs of each soft synth that I had. What I found was, every synth basically follows the same principles in the way that they are designed and knowing how one works can lead you to figure out another one. So, I decided to simplify the learning process and teach you how to understand any soft synth and build your own sounds.
Almost all soft synths have a uniform way of generating sound, known as subtractive synthesis. An oscillator makes a sound (or noise), a filter removes frequencies from that sound, then the result is modulated (changed over time) in some way.
For today, I will be focusing on recognizing the oscillator section of a soft synth. I have expanded the definition of oscillator to include anything that makes the sound. A synth using samples or physical modeling is not technically “oscillating,” but it still generates a sound and then filters and modulates, so it’s just easier to look at them all the same.
The first way to locate an oscillator is to look for wave shapes. In the example below, I’ve put an orange box around the three oscillators of this Logic synth.
Notice the wave shapes that you can choose from by turning the dials. Sine waves, square waves, triangles, pulses, and sawtooth are very common. I would recommend trying them out to learn what they sound like. I can also make a video demonstrating the different sounds if anyone asks. While the layout can be quite different, the idea of having a thing generate the basic sound will always be there. Here is what Absynth 5 looks like if you go to the Patch tab.
Instead of turning a dial, you choose waves from a drop down menu in Absynth, but the idea is still basically the same.
Ableton went one step easier and actually included the word oscillator in Operator:
Armed with that information, see if you can locate the oscillator section of this synth:
And now try Massive:
My last example is a physical modeling synth from Logic, if you have trouble, try comparing this one to the Logic example above.
So the homework is to try out some different sounds and learn what the character of each wave is. Next time we will look at the different types of filters and how they modify the sound from the oscillators. If you would like me to cover a specific soft synth or subject, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message.
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