A synthesizer is one type of electronic instrument that develops some crucial forms of analog and digital processing to produce soothing sound. Just like their name suggests, the primary goal of most synthesizers is to reproduce acoustic sounds that will have low to medium pitch.
Even though synthesizers emulate acoustic instruments, they do not create sounds the same as other acoustic instruments do. For example, many professional and advanced synthesizers contain the label “piano”. This means that the settings of synthesizers will have classic 88 keys but the sound will be produced by electric tone.
Learning synthesis programming is undoubtedly a hard task. Here are the top 4 essential synthesis tips for beginners.
Think Before You Act
Even the basic synthesizer can be extremely hard to program if you don’t know the steps. Synthesizers are all about experimentation, but often you can take a step back and consider the sound of the synthesizer that you want. This is a very helpful step to create some marvelous sounds.
As the square wave of the synthesizer has a hollow tone, it’s a decent point for synthesizing woodwind instruments. The wave pattern there has a smoother tone that is extremely effective at generating string-like instruments.
Another thing you need to consider is how the instrument changes over time and how you can apply filters.
Create New Depths
Natural sounds and the sound of the acoustic instruments aren’t permanent. They change and evolve continuously. If you loop a human recording with a string instrument or even use the analog synth, your music will become much colder. Additionally, the sound produced from the synthesizer might not fulfill your expectations.
Hence, it’s always recommended to consider the ways through which you can implement natural and subtle movements to your synthesized sounds. One of the best ways to achieve that is by setting your synthesizer’s LFO to modulate parameters such as filter cut-off, oscillator pitch, and pulse width modulation. As per Music radar, LFO stands for low-frequency oscillator.
Layer Up
If you want to make your bases, leads, and chords different from the others, you can try layering multiple parts of your synthesizer on top of each other to create large multi-voice sounds. You can achieve this by setting a specific number of MIDI tracks in the sequencer just like the other MIDI control. After that, you can start the synthesizer into each one.
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Multiple Oscillators
Another great way to add richness and depth to the synthesizer patches is by using multiple oscillators that are slightly detuned against each other. The detuning is extremely important to increase the pitch of the oscillators. If you want to create sound using two oscillators, make sure you detune the first one up 5 cents and the second one down 5 cents.
However, if you want thicker sound, you can use the great sense of detuning in your synthesizer. This will come in handy especially in bug-trance-styled synth chords. Additionally, remember that some synthesizers offer a unison mode that multiplies the voice of your synthesizer for each note. This will help you to choose the degree of detuning.
Conclusion
These are the top 4 important synthesis tips beginners should remember. Learning a synthesizer takes time and effort. Hence, be patient while learning the instrument.