Are you someone who has grown tired of synth presets in your DAW, instead looking to sculpt your own unique synth sounds as you hear them in your head and make your music truly your own? Something holding many budding musicians and producers back from this is how seemingly complicated the sound editing section can appear.
The good news is, sometimes the soft synths that appear overly complex to edit are actually not. It’s simply that the developers wanted the synth VST to come across as having more features than competitors. It really may be that the ninth slider you’re looking at is largely for show.
Not to mention that many soft synths are modelled on classic hardware synths, and every button or dial from said synth will be replicated into your DAW, even when the digital emulation of the synth perhaps doesn’t need as many bells and whistles.
Once you know the basics of synth sound design, the different options will no longer leave you flustered and you’ll be quickly waving goodbye to presets and creating sounds that perhaps others will want to copy for themselves. Let’s look at the top tweaks and sound design tips for this synth guide.
The need-to-know of synthesis
If you thought you’d have to open a hardware synthesizer and examine all its wires, nuts and bolts, don’t worry. It’s actually a case of understanding a few principles that will serve you when you wish to start tinkering with synth sounds more yourself.
It all culminates with a signal flow coming from oscillators, which are the sound generators. The sounds include sawtooth, known for its buzzing effect, sine wave, square (think those classic GameBoy theme tunes), and other types that can be found, depending on the synth in question.
That audio signal is then sent through a filter which removes certain frequencies. The boffin term for this is subtractive synthesis. Last but not least, the audio signal reaches an amplifier, which, as the name lovingly suggests, amplifies the sound into the world so we can hear it. This is the process that applies to physical synth instruments and software synth VSTs.
Some common controls include envelopes and low-frequency oscillators (LFOs), which are very frequently used to edit the sounds further.
You may have heard about sine, square, and sawtooth waves, which are found in the oscillator section. These play a vital role in the foundational sound of a synth. Over in the filter section is where you’ll find the frequency subtraction mentioned earlier — this is done via the low pass, high pass, and band pass. You can also control the resonance and frequency of certain sounds.
Volume control and an envelope for time-based sound-shaping (via attack, decay, sustain, and release parameters) are to be found in the amplifier section.
Subtractive synthesis was the norm for the earliest analogue synthesizers, and there are examples of it being used in telecommunications technology in the late 1930s. Another prominent type is frequency modulation, or FM synthesis, which was a game-changer and brought about the dominance of digital synthesizers from the mid-80s onwards.
FM synthesis is able to produce sounds that resemble acoustic instruments and sounds from the world around us. Another digital style is wavetable synthesis, which has the ability to morph different waveforms. Emerging methods that deserve a shout-out include physical modelling and granular synthesis.
