Becoming a Synth Dynamo

Another 50-something year old here, also a synthesizerist since I was a teenager.

I've found it very, very useful to have a piano in my studio, even though I haven't taken lessons - it has been great to engage in various Youtube channels and learn proper keys playing, fingering, chord construction and so on.

Also, Rick Beato is a god. If you're a synthesizerist but not a keyboardist, you need to spend some time with Rick.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJquYOG5EL82sKTfH9aMA9Q

He's gonna teach you things you should know and that WILL make you a better musician, especially around the subject of keyboarding and playing.

To each their own, but starting with FM synthesis over subtractive synthesis (particularly when it's an $800 box in question) seems to me like a good way to frustrate the average person. Now, the Digitone is no DX7 when it comes to complexity, but I've always felt like additive/FM synthesis just completely went over the layman's head. I love FM synthesis for the outright insane stuff that you can build with it, but subtractive synths have always filled the knob-twiddling hole in my heart. Once you know the basic components, you can dial in pretty much anything you can think of with a good degree of confidence.

My recommended beginners synth would probably be the Behringer Neutron [0]. You can often find it used/on sale for less than a third of the price of a Digitone, and it's a design that "grows" pretty well for the average learner. You can already get a ton of mileage out of default configuration, but then it also has a patch bay that would make your Mother-32 turn green with jealousy.

[0] https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=P0CM5

Personally I'd recommend starting small with an Artruria Microbrute. It has one oscillator and no presets. Print some preset examples out from Brutal Patches and enter them on your own to learn. The manual that comes with has great synthesis explanations that aren't too complicated.

It has MIDI and a tiny patch bay. You can expand from there if you want. If you need a drum track, get yourself a Pocket Operator Rhythm and clock it from the Microbrute.

(Be careful, this is a gateway drug. I learned how to use a Microbrute and now I own 168hp of Eurorack modules, a 0-Coast, and an Arturia Matrixbrute.)

If you’re going to buy behringer, just buy second hand off craigslist/reverb. There’s so many of them flying around already because people buy them and then upgrade to something more powerful - no need to further saturate the secondary market.

Hardware has the advantage of tactility and stability(both in terms of "boots the same every time, no software install or licensing" and "built to not crash"), and the disadvantages of physical maintenance, connectivity(a real studio setup needs physical cables and patch bays, so recalling a config is not so simple) and inflexible interfaces(some hardware is actually just bad to program because it's too complex to fit in a front panel). It's very personal and philosophical to decide on one or the other approach.

For me the right compromise has been to get a MIDI knob controller like the Korg Nanokontrol, use plugins to build up sounds, but bounce to samples frequently. When I want really fresh sounds, I go look for new presets or sample packs.

Working in samples using a powerful sampler/sequencer like Renoise, you've got a ton of flexibility to add production, since you can send it back through the synthesis path as many times as you want. The loss is primarily on the end of expressive performance in the raw source, which is where using a knob controller comes in to build up an expressive part when and where it's called for. Keyboarding skills can also do some of this, albeit in a different way: knob sweeps over an existing sequence is like conducting an orchestra, while little shifts in rhythm and velocity add individuality to a part.

And although extensive modulation is technically appealing, most uses of it will make a sound effect that doesn't seat itself well in an arrangement. The big stuff for performance is usually the same tried-and-true - sweep the filter, bend the pitch, vary amplitude. And this is stuff that is more satisfying to do with real time controls, for sure. But I am also a bit disillusioned of the idea that my synth noises will sound so much different from preset synth noises as to define my sound: it's like how digital artists will get overly focused on brushes, or journeyman programmers will have big ideas to solve localized code problems without really integrating the solution into the big picture. There's faster feedback when you tweak synth knobs or mess with brush styles or do a lot of edit-test-debug, and that's very engaging, fun to toy with, but the feedback won't drive you in a particular creative direction unless you already know the goal.

Behringer 2600 - lots of fun and sounds great.

> Dynamo = a forceful energetic individual

Dynamo = dynamic individual

> For me (being Dutch), a dynamo is an electricity generator

That's what a dynamo is in English as well. But yes, a dynamo is also a forceful energetic individual (or thing).

Good call out - I was also going to make a comment about the importance of effects, but as the article is trying to keep things simple, I didn't want to complicate matters!

The Valhalla DSP effects are fantastic value, and SuperMassive, my absolute favourite, is also free as in beer. I suspect Sean reads HN https://valhalladsp.com/

Ableton's online tutorial is also wonderful! https://learningsynths.ableton.com/

100%. Doing a bunch of work in Syntorial is a huge shortcut to "getting it". And once you've done that, a synth is a synth is a synth. Like driving a car, becomes more, "oh yeah, this oscillator is a bit weird/interesting", rather than "wtf does this shit do"

Wendy Carlos explains synths in under 4m (1970) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SBDH5uhs4Q

The article under discussion was written by the creator of Syntorial.

I think physical modeling is a poor choice.

The advantage of subtractive synthesis is that each of its elements (oscillators, filters, amplifiers, modulation, effects) has an impact on the sound more or less independent of the others, and so their parameters can be understood and modified independently of the others.

In other techniques, notably FM and physical modeling, the parameters and elements are very tightly coupled and nonlinear: the particular effect of parameter X changes depending on the setting of parameter Y. As a result you can't study the pieces separately, but instead must understand the dynamics of the entire system as a global unit. This is what made FM nearly impossible for musicians to wrap their heads around: and it also plagues physical modeling.

The other problem with physical modeling is that there are many physical modeling methods and architectures, and learning one doesn't help all that much with regard to the others.

Why bother with learning a special "image editing" application ?

Why can't folks make good looking pictures from just code ?

Algorithms implemented in soft synths need to take certain things like aliasing into account and if every musicians had to bother with that, there would be much less EDM for you to enjoy.

The same reason people use Photoshop instead of command line ImageMagick.

I want a slider I can change in realtime to hear the sound change.

Synthesizing audio, and by extention entire songs with code is really hard, try it some time. Sonic-PI seems like a good lib for it but its still really difficult - lots of threading needed to make layers of different "instruments"

https://sonic-pi.net/

People probably could make good sounding music from code, but it's harder. When you're making a new patch on your synth, you don't want to think about complicated matters like code-as-text, you want to be able to turn a knob and hear a difference, with each change getting closer and closer to the wanted sound. Having to write even one line of code instead of sliding a slider up/down would instantly put me out of the flow when I'm creating new patches, no doubt. Changing values to some specific value instead of kind-of-here-sounds-good-to-me would slow down the entire flow as well. Switching between computer keyboard and my synth keyboard just to make a small change would do the same.

All in all, if you know exactly what you want you could probably do it in code, but part of the fun in creating a patch, and what helps with creativity, is experimentation, and I feel like that would easily get lost when coding with strict values and other "computer" syntax that fiddling with a real synth just flows together with the rest of the music making process.

There is no comparison really between the UX of sitting with a computer keyboard in front of a screen, writing/editing syntax to hear changes and hearing real-time sounds coming from something like Novation Summit together with a good pair of headphones, with zero screens involved.

The same reason OpenSCAD is less popular than graphical CAD softwares.

Have a look into supercollider and tidalcycles

Have you ever used Ableton?

You could do that, just like you could write a web app in assembly.

stuff like https://sonic-pi.net/#examples does exists, but what you start to realize is that, is even the "code first" approaches to making music, you are really just generating configuration on the fly that's being processed buy some other engine underneath, in this case it's Super collider.

There is a scene for live coding music. I've always like this example using SuperCollider and Common Lisp:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzTH_ZqaFKI

But against a synthesist with a nice hardware synth or computer synths, there's no way coding can compete with the speed and dynamic interaction of the interface. I think this is a nice example that shows just how fast crafting a simple tune can be with a dedicated interface such as the Elektron Analog Four:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm0WuPltadM

Then there's things like AudioMulch that really blur the lines between coding, synthesis, and something else:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K_RTS73jSY

A lot of music and synthesis is about experimentation and just playing, and that's something that text-based code doesn't quite capture well.

I would almost never recommend a beginner start with eurorack, no matter how passionate, unless you're talking about using VCV Rack or something. Physical eurorack is a money pit, and the people who own it are the first people to cop to it. Many modular systems I've seen are basically $10,000 worth of modules that add up to one well-built desktop synthesizer which you could purchase for $500-$1000.

I love my eurorack gear but holy hell it's by far the most expensive way to make the boops beep.

I have a Moog mother that I use when I want to teach folks synth stuff, but it'd be a really limited as an instrument.

Depends on the kind of music you do. Eurorack isn't great for polyphony, so for a keyboardist a good polysynth can be a better idea.