If you’re into music production most likely you use synthesizers for some of your sounds especially if you’re into dance or electronic music. And if you’re like me, you really don’t want to use just the presets. You’d like to program some of your own sounds. But then you dig into the architecture of the synth and your head starts spinning so fast you think it’s going to fly right off your body. Especially since each synth is different. Well, fear not. I am going to try to generically walk you through synthesizer programming in a way that will make it all very clear and easy to understand. When I’m done, you’ll be able to program just about any synthesizer in the world with very few exceptions.
Let’s start with your basic sound source, the oscillator.
Oscillator’s are what produce the different sounds that you hear from your synth. Without an oscillator, you have nothing. Oh sure, you could use some white or other colored noise source to get sound but t wouldn’t be anything useful for creating music.
Every synth has to have at least one oscillator. Some have 2 or 3. Modular synths can have an infinite number of oscillators. But you need at least one. So whatever synth you’re using, find a section that says oscillator or osc for short.
Okay, every oscillator has some kind of sound “color” in the form of waves. Common waves are sawtooth, square and pulse. These are usually marked by some kind of symbol that fairly accurately represents what the wave looks like. Some synths actually write out the name in some abbreviated fashion such as saw, sqr, etc. There is usually some kind of knob or slider to choose which wave you want the oscillator to sound when a key is pressed in your keyboard. If you fiddle around with the various waves you will notice certain characteristics in their sounds. These characteristics are, to a certain extent, a part of real world instruments. When combined in certain ways along with the other parts of the synthesizer, they can actually emulate, to some degree, the sounds of real world instruments. Please note that no synthesizer, no matter how good it is, can accurately duplicate the sound of a real world instrument unless the synth has samples built in. And even then, you’re going to get close but not exact.
When two or more oscillators are used together, they can be detuned in pitch in order to “fatten” the sound. You’ll find this detuning prevalent in a lot of synth based music. In fact, it’s very rare for synth sounds to be flat and dry. They really have very little character when programmed that way.
After you have chosen your oscillator sources, the next step in the chain is to run the sound through a filter. There are many types of filters in synths. The two most common are lowpass and highpass. Lowpass filters filter out the high frequencies and let the low ones come through. Highpass do the opposite. So if you want a real low bass sound, you would use a lowpass filter. If you wanted to recreate a cymbal or high hat effect, you would use a highpass filter.
You can set the cutoff point for each filter. This cutoff point will determine how much of the sound comes through. The higher the cutoff point (moving the cutoff slider or knob to the right) the more sound comes through.
With a filter, you also get a resonance setting with most synths. The higher the setting, the more the sound will resonate. By using the resonance setting that’s how we get those nice filter sweeps common in a lot of electronic music.
Next we have the ADSR envelope which stands for attack, decay, sustain release. This controls how quickly the oscillator sounds and how quickly or slowly the oscillator stops making sound. Short attacks are good for making bass and plucked sounds. Long attacks are good for blow like sounds or slow pads. Short decay settings are good for plucked sounds. Same with sustain. I won’t get into the differences between decay and sustain here as that’s a bit involved. Release controls how long the sound continues after the key is released. Long release settings are great for ambient pads or for simulating long reverb. In short, the ADSR envelope shapes the contour of the sound.
Now, these envelopes, in some synths, can be used to also control how quickly or slowly the filter reacts to the sound. It can slow down the attack of cutoff if it’s being modulated. It can slowly raise the resonance point. Most synths comes with an ADSR 1 and 2. The first one is usually assigned to the oscillator while the second one is assigned to the filter. By combining these, we can get some very interesting sounds that aren’t static.
Finally, we have the LFO section which stands for low frequency oscillator. The LFO is like an oscillator but it doesn’t make any sound by itself because it works on too low a frequency to be heard by the human ear. Like the sound oscillator, it also has waves. The most common on sine and square. The sine wave, when used to modulate the sound oscillator, produces things like vibrato. When controlled by the mod wheel, it can bring the vibrato in and out. Most LFOs will have a setting where you choose what source controls it, such as your mod wheel.
What I have described above is a very basic synthesizer. However, even the most complex synthesizers are made up of these basic components. For example, a modular synthesizer is just lots of different modules that you can put together that essentially all contain oscillators, filters, ADSRs and LFOs. You can then combine these in some very interesting ways. If you want to experiment with this, pick up Sonigen Modular. It’s free.
Synthesizer programming is not hard. But it does take time to get familiar with all the working parts. But if you take them one at a time and understand that you need an oscillator first in order to get a sound, you won’t be sitting there hitting keys and getting no sound from your synth. Once you can get a sound, experiment. You can’t break anything. By letting your mind go free, you may find that you come up with some very interesting sounds.
Happy programming.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim