http://www.synthgnosis.com
There is a sample sine wave and a square wave to go along with this lesson available on the site. It comes directly from my synthesizer and it’s for loading into your audio editor of choice. Once downloaded and inserted into your audio editor of choice, stretch the track view and look at the drawn waveform. Does it look familiar? It should!
Synthesizer programming is something that’s often strayed away from due to all of those big, fancy words. Sometimes, something like a Low Frequency Oscillator seems so incredibly frightening that we don’t even attempt to try and learn synthesizer programming. I want to tell you that it’s MUCH more easy than you’ve ever imagined, and I’m here to show you how and why.
Synth programming is very simple. It basically starts with a wave, or a shape. We call them waveforms. The most common types of these shapes, waves, or ‘waveforms’ are below:
(in no particular order)
Sine
Triangle
Square
Pulse
Sawtooth (Saw)
Noise
There are many more shapes, but we’ll save that for another time. We have what we call an oscillator, and this oscillator generates one of the aforementioned waveforms. It then goes into what’s called a filter, which is where the basic subtractive synthesis takes place. Subtractive synthesis is the most common type of synthesis. Basically, you ‘take out’ (subtract) what you don’t want from the original waveform and it produces the desired timbre. It is then run into the amplifier which is simply volume.
Oscillator – Filter – Amplifier
This is the order in which synthesis takes place. Congrats. You now know more than most about synth programming just from these little tidbits of information.
Duration : 0:8:26
[youtube l5Pja05w99s]