There's a whole world to explore in subtractive synthesis, but you may find yourself at some point wanting to go outside that paradigm, and if so, it's easier to explore in the digital realm.
There's a whole world to explore in subtractive synthesis, but you may find yourself at some point wanting to go outside that paradigm, and if so, it's easier to explore in the digital realm.
If you wish to train your ear and learn subtractive synthesis I'd highly recommend https://www.syntorial.com/, which makes you recreate various sounds in a very structured and interactive way, slowly building up complexity.
Syntorial will get you far down the road of listening to the elements of subtractive synthesis. It’s a happy journey and one that gives you subtractive synth skills that can be applied to any of the hardware recommended here.
Almost all early sound cards had an FM chip, so I forget that people today might not have been exposed to this tech.
Also, there is the interesting area between the AdLib ROL/MIDI synthesis and full blown digitized audio such as wav/mp3... the demoscene was sampling digital audio, chopping it up (MOD/S3M/etc. file format). The result was a wav-like audio file in a tiny file size. Some of the tracker formats, such as Scream Tracker I believe, could do both FM synth and PCM output[4]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USNTZl7DGls
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H_g7WQMnFE
This is typically called wavetable synthesis. You generate the (typically complex) waveform using other means, then load it into the synth and do stuff with it.
I remember ripping .MOD files from DOS games and marvelling at how well they were composed/crafted. In particular, I still remember some amazing work by Andrew Sega, aka "Necros" [0].
Thank you for your comment, it brought back wonderful memories.