Synthesizer Discussion - Film, Television and Music

Discuss synthesizers and synthesizer-related news here. Here's a quick glossary to get us started. Synthesizer - An electronic device that generates or otherwise modifies audio signals. They can be analog, digital, or a blend of the two. Analog - In an analog synth, the audio signal flows entirely through analog circuits, although the interface and some components may have digital elements. They're usually much more expensive than digital and have either no or extremely limited polyphony as a result. Digital - A digital synth does all of its audio processing via machine code (usually C or C++). Digital synths can be physical with all the knobs of an analog synth, or they can just be a program or plugin that runs on your computer. Digital synths have a reputation for menu diving, but there are still many that are knob-per-function. Polyphony - A polyphonic synthesizer, or polysynth, can play multiple notes (or voices) at a time. Note that most monosynths have multiple oscillators that can be tuned at offsets to mimic chords, but only respond to one key at a time being pressed on a keyboard. Menu diving - An interface that has lots of functionality, but not a lot of buttons. Most actions tend to take several keypresses and can take the fun out of having a physical synthesizer. Knob-per-function - An interface that has one knob for every thing it can do. These are favored by musicians who want everything at their fingertips so they can focus more on playing and less on programming. Polysynth - A polyphonic analog synth has all the elements of a monophonic synth, but multiplied by however many voices the synth has. Analog polysynths usually cost from about $1000 to $7000. Monosynth - A monosynth has only one voice, but usually has multiple oscillators. The vast majority of monosynths are analog, and are quite popular due to their affordability. A traditional monosynth can cost from about $200 to $1500, if you want a Moog. Most are around $400. Oscillator - An audio generator that, given an input pitch, produces an output tone. Oscillators can be voltage controlled, digitally controlled, or digital. Keyboard - A musical keyboard that you can input notes on. Keyboards output a number of expressions such as velocity, channel aftertouch, polyphonic aftertouch, and release velocity. Special MIDI polyphonic expression or MPE keyboards can also output timbre and bend signals using the keys, something that regular keyboards use mod wheels for. Voltage controlled oscillator - A VCO is an analog oscillator that takes an input pitch voltage and produces an output tone in a number of waveforms. VCOs are unstable, and pitch varies with temperature. They can take around 30 minutes to fully warm up and stabilize. Some synthesists prefer this unstable behavior as it makes the synth sound more alive and ever-changing, but others can be annoyed by their instrument never being quite perfectly in-tune. Digitally controlled oscillator - A DCO is an analog oscillator that gets its pitch from a digital clock and produce an output tone in a number of waveforms. They're rock-solid and don't drift at all. Digital oscillator - A digital oscillator can produce the same waveforms that analog oscillators can produce, but they can also utilize wavetable synthesis to produce harmonic variation at the source, rather than further down the line with filters. Velocity - How hard you hit a key. Most keyboards actually measure how fast you hit a key, but it works well enough. Channel aftertouch - Aftertouch is a pressure sensor at the bottom of a keybed so that you can press down a little harder on an already-pressed key to modulate the sound. Channel aftertouch is monophonic. Polyphonic aftertouch - With polyphonic aftertouch, each key has its own individual pressure sensor so that the modulation only applies to the voice the key is responsible for. These keyboards are a lot more rare and a lot more expensive. Release velocity - How fast you let go of a key. It's in the MIDI standard, but pretty much nobody uses it except for MPE synths. MIDI polyphonic expression - A new addition to the MIDI standard, MPE uses each of the 16 available midi channels for each voice to provide polyphonic pitch bend and timbre messages. Timbre - A generic modulation message usually mapped to vertical movement on MPE keyboards. Bend - A pitch bend message that can be used to bend voices for expressive effects like vibrato. Mod wheel - A wheel on the left side of a keyboard used to apply monophonic modulation to all voices. Waveform - An audio signal "shape" that repeats at high frequencies to produce a tone. The shape of a wave, particularly its symmetricality, determines the harmonic complexity of a sound. A sine wave has a single fundamental harmonic and is the most pure tone. A sawtooth wave has harmonics at the fundamental, 2x the fundamnetal, 3x, 4x and so on, with each harmonic decreasing in amplitude. A square wave has harmonics at the fundamental, 3x the fundamnetal, 5x, 7x and so on, with each harmonic decreasing in amplitude. It's like a sawtooth, but with every other harmonic taken out. A triangle wave has the same harmonics as a square wave, but each harmonic decreases in amplitude much faster, resulting in a more bassy sound. Triangles and squares are mathematically even functions, and thus consist of even harmonics. Sawtooth waves are mathematically odd, and contain both even and odd harmonics. One exception waveform is noise, which has no pitch and consists of completely random movement. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/596/f798f9de-9090-4606-8c4c-41e0c4c51064/image.png Wavetable synthesis - It's basically an arbitrary waveform. Some synths just have a number of preset waveform samples, but others allow you to change the shape of the wave either through waveshaping or modifying the audio samples directly. Note that due to their (mostly!) static and repeating nature, wavetables do not and can not contain any inharmonic content due to their comb-like nature. Harmonic - A harmonic is a frequency that is a multiple of a fundamental base frequency. Many types of distortion add harmonic content, and different kinds of filters take harmonic content away. Inharmonic content is added by noise elements and, with the exception of the noise "waveform", is not generally sought-out for in synthesizers. However, inharmonic content makes a large impact on how realistic a patch sounds when trying to imitate acoustic instruments. Filter - A filter attenuates the harmonic content of a signal, depending on the type. A low-pass (or high-cut) filter cuts out the high frequencies, muffling the sound. A high-pass (or low-cut) filter cuts out the low frequencies, cleaning up the unnecessary bass and noise in a mix. They make a sound brighter and colder. A band-pass filter is a combination of the two, only letting a narrow range of frequncies through. Guitar wah-wah pedals use band-pass filters to create a vowel-like effect. A notch (or band-stop) filter is the opposite of a band-pass, letting all frequncies but a narrow range through. Filters also have a resonance or peak knob that accentuates the cutoff frequency and sometimes screams when driven hard. Filters contribute a great deal to a synthesizer's sound signature, with tons of variation in resonance behavior. Modulation - Modulation is basically the act of changing a parameter with time. Modulation sources can come from mod wheels, low-frequency oscillators, envelopes, light sensors, plants etc. and can modulate filters, amplitude, frequency, and pretty much everything else when working with either digital or modular synthesizers. When the modulation source is an oscillator, this produces amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, and phase modulation. MIDI - Musical Instrument Digital Interface. it was created in the 80s as a way to daisy-chain synthesizers together and is still the de-facto medium today. Only just recently are alternatives such as Open Sound Protocol (OSC) beginning to get attention. Note that MIDI is purely a communication protocol and is not to be confused with General MIDI, the stuff that plays back .mid files on your computer. Wow this is taking a long time. I'll continue with the glossary later. Here watch this tape. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atvtBE6t48M

What's your workflow with it? I've seen a bunch of youtube videos on it and it seems like quite a hassle to do the things that come naturally with a DAW or a Deluge. Is it just for the analog filter and the lofi DAC? Cause I totally understand that, one of these days when I'm rich and famous I'm gonna get me an E-mu SP-1200. I'll have to pay off my student loans first though.

I'm listening to it right now and wow, this is really nice. Everything oozes with texture, it's great.

Hell yeah synth thread. I have an Oberheim Matrix-1000, a Minimoog Voyager, and a Prophet-6. I do a lot of work reproducing tones for electric/analog keyboards. I made a demo with the Oberheim that I posted in the general music writing thread awhile back. I'm currently trying to make a movie soundtrack with the Prophet and the Oberheim for fun.

Damn, those are some quality synths. For the soundtrack, are you sequencing it? Or overdubbing?

I usually start by overdubbing little demos of sections as part of the writing process. When I am tracking stuff that will hopefully be final, I sequence as much as possible, unless it's a small clip that needs pitch or mod wheel adjustments that I can do more quickly on my own. For the Oberheim demo, there's a solo that I double tracked by myself and played it slightly differently to enhance the stereo effect for certain parts. I'm sure there's a lot of QoL features in cubase that I'm not taking advantage of though. I'm writing it for an imaginary film so that I don't find myself wanting to write a certain kind of track, but not using because it doesn't fit anywhere. Real film scoring comes with some pretty serious expectation that huge pieces might get cut out, but I'm not gonna be that strict if I'm not getting paid for it.

Anyone else like Arturia's VST selections? Idk how accurate most of them are but I'm getting some awesome sounds.

I just wanna emphasize how great the video in the OP is, the series (3 parts) is what got me into synthesizing in the first place.

https://i.imgur.com/ukktB9u.jpg I picked up one of these earlier this year because it was the cheapest synth I could find with polyphony and built in keys (I wanted something portable and fun to play). I'm new to synthesizers but I was very impressed with what it's capable of.

Oh, which one is this? I've only heard of the reface cs, didn't know there was a synth version

It's a CS. There are 4 variants: CS: analog synthesis DX: FM synthesis CP: electric piano YP: electric organ

If you're into synths but haven't read about additive synthesis before check it out some time. The theory aspect is cool even if you might rarely use it practically. The OP video touched on harmonics a little bit but it can help to see how what we perceive as tone is actually many frequencies stacked together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3D1fPjWAnc You can hear this same effect but turning your Lowpass Filter resonance up relatively high and slowly opening the filter. You'll hear harmonics being added. One of my favorite examples of how we perceive individual frequencies as tone is human vowels. If you listened to a sustained vowel for long enough, particularly from synthesized voice, it'll start to sound flat and nothing like a voice, and you'll focus on the harmonics rather than the combination of the whole.

Speaking of additive synthesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4

Did someone say additive synthesis? Been working on one of these things. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109701/249ca48c-d7d4-4a92-808a-915eccaacd35/IMG_1565[1].MOV https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109701/5d0c84ce-a6e6-483c-8df3-3d569bff67d4/image.jpg

I somehow didn't know this thread existed.... I have a stupidly big eurorack case sitting 6 feet from me and a shitload of bizarre synths like the kawai 5000 and evolution evs-1 strewn about the place

That's fuckin' awesome. Is it a Hammond? That's fuckin' awesome as well. Do you use it to make songs or are you still working on that part?

I'm just barely not a hobbyist. I do occasional soundtrack and production work. I do have a new dark ambienty noise project that's in a fairly nascent stage development but looks promising

It is, but it's one of their lesser-known models (i.e. not a B3).

Man I want a Deepmind 6. I'd love to have a polysynth I can just sit on my lap and play. Sound design on a mono is fun but after a certain point you just want to play chords.