Learning Synthesis & Coming Up With New Sounds.

[Críoch]

Just an idea for anyone wanting to learn more about synthesis, or for those wanting to generate new patches & break away from established, sometimes stale approaches.

Background: Spent the afternoon doing some office work & was using a website that was taking a while to update between tasks. Was listening to a few mixes to help pass the time..

Heard an interesting sound.. Opened Ableton & fired up Operator & did a few tweaks on an initial patch, quickly nailing the ripping, computer, dub siren type sound, by adding a square wave lfo to the pitch of a single Oscillator / Operator. Never made that sound before.. but with some additional tweaks, the addition of a pitch envelope etc.. I started getting some really interesting ideas. Tried some of these out on a hw synth later & I definitely learned something new.

If anyone here wants to generate a few sounds for later inspiration or freshen-up their existing patch muscles, its not a bad method to get away from repetitive patterns of creative behaviour. I know i get frustrated sometimes when I want to make something unique sounding & I realise that I'm in full zombie mode, adding a filter envelope. Again..

When I was a teenager playing guitar, I'd always have an unplugged electric on my lap when watching TV, playing along to incidental music, theme tunes & adverts. Is all equal in the race to hit 10k hours?

Kept on doing my job & occasionally making sounds while I was waiting for stuff to update. Filling in the minutes

[mindstuff]

Good points...the more you do the better you get. If you want a unique sound this is a must. A while back I made a conscious decision to always make my own samples/sounds for every track I create. This approach took much longer to achieve results initially but now its second nature. I can patch up pretty much any percussives I need pretty quickly now.

[MonoTeksist]

Yeah making your own sounds is fun. I did around 400 presets with Massive and 250-ish with Ultra Analog VA-3. This last one is one MAD soft synth. Bubbly percloops and general wackiness: easy.

I got this huge MIT book on synthesis, I'll have to start reading it again. You have to find a balance between just random tweaking/doing things by ear and actually knowing what you're doing. It's all great, I like to learn new stuff.

[Alethylene]

Basic shit with every synth is to create a sample library(kicks, snare, fx, chords and so on), I realised how to make this typical random sequences in commercial psy and goa trance. For FM synths worked for me how to emulate PWM sound without adjustable width of waveform, or how to get supersawish timbre without doubling OSC, it's also a nice starting point to create more complex patches. Also interesting to watch 0-coast(type any synth) videos and trying to emulate this sound on synths that you have in your VSTi library. Was trying to mess with patches in SOS synth secrets & VCV/Reaktor. Right now it's interesting for me to mess with some wavetable synths to make them pronounce a few words, like 1-2-3-5 patch in Waldorfs Largo but in Ableton Wavetable and so on, get nice results with piano WT in it, was thinkin to make a classic hardcore tune but using only wavetable as a sampler.

[timc3]

This is also useful: https://www.soundonsound.com/series/synth-secrets

[Lost to the Void]

I had a large sheet of steel in the back garden yesterday, attached a USB speaker to it and a contact mic and then played different sounds through it and recorded.

Built up an awesome sound library in 1 hour of play.