Synthesis Masterclass

Creating your own sounds from scratch is one of the best ways to master the complex and occasionally daunting art of synthesis. Mark Cousins throws away the presets.

While it’s easy enough to comprehend the mechanical building blocks of a synthesizer – the filter, envelopes, oscillators and so on – it’s much harder to understand how to successfully combine these ingredients to create a finished sound. All too often, a first attempt at sound design involves a few tentative tweaks to an existing preset or blindly adjusting parameters until something sounds ‘right’ – often leading to a sound that lacks both character and definition. By contrast, the skill and experience of a good sound designer enables them to draw on a palette of key sounds and effects, each of which can be fine tuned to match the musical objective in mind.

This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 78
Filed under Home, General Features, Features

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