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Jan 10, 2024 · Electronic Musical Instrument. A synthesizer is an electronic musical instrument that is capable of producing and manipulating a wide range of sounds. Unlike traditional musical instruments that produce sound through physical vibration, synthesizers generate sound electronically using various components and techniques.
Mar 13, 2024 · It’s common to think of a synthesizer as a keyboard instrument because many come in that form. Having a musical keyboard does make synthesizers a little easier to understand, but they don’t all come in that form. Many synths are desktop units or rack-mount units with no keyboard. Now is a good time to discuss control voltage (CV) briefly ...
Aug 22, 2023 · A synthesizer, commonly known as a synth, is an electronic musical instrument that generates sound by generating signals. It’s the powerhouse behind popular music genres like pop, hip-hop, and EDM that dominate the airwaves today. But what sets a synthesizer apart from traditional instruments is its ability to manipulate and sculpt soundwaves ...
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- The Waveforms
- The Filters
- The Envelopes
- The LFO
- Polyphony
- Unison Mode
- Analog Mode
- Sync Mode
- Ring Modulation
- Granular Modulation
Everything starts with a waveform, which can be synth based (meaning an oscillator) or sample based (meaning recorded audio). And there are also many types of synthesizers that use different techniques to create and shape the waveforms. But basically the waveforms are the main building material for any sound.
Filters are one of the fundamental ways to shape the sound of a synthesizer. Basically you can think of the filters like special types of equalizers that you use to form the range of frequencies you want to focus your sound on.
The main way to shape the sound of a synthesizer over time, is with the envelopes. A synthesizer can also have several envelopes that control different parameters. The 2 most common are the Amp Envelope and the Filter Envelope, which are standard features on all synthesizers. Sometimes they are simply called envelope 1, envelope 2 and so on, which ...
The LFO is short for low frequency oscillator. The difference between the LFO and the oscillators used as waveforms for the sound, is that the LFO is used to add a continuous movement for any parameter you route it to. Here are the main settings of a standard LFO: 1. Waveform The type of waveform used for the LFO. The default LFO waveform is a sine...
The polyphony setting simply states how many notes you can play at the same time. If the polyphony is set to 1, the synth can only play 1 note at a time. If you want to be able to play harmonies and chords, you need to set the polyphony to a higher setting. However, sometimes you actually want to have the synth in monophonic mode, for example on ba...
The unison mode is a fEeature on many synthesizers, which purpose is to make the sound wider and fatter. It works by duplicating the waveform into several copies, and then slightly detuning each copy, and spreading them in stereo space. Think of this as the difference between one solo violin, and a violin section playing in unison (the exact same p...
On some synthesizers you have a feature called “Analog” or sometimes “Drift”, which adds slight variations in mainly the tuning and phase of the waveform. This occurs naturally in analog synthesizers, and you can think of this, as similar to the random slight variations of tuning, timbre and tonal character of an acoustic instrument. Because every ...
Would you like the ability to make the synth sound more harmonically rich, sharper and more aggressive? Well, oscillator sync is a great way to accomplish this. It is sometimes simply called sync mode, but most often it is labeled as “hard sync”.
Ring modulation is a feature where 2 waveforms are multiplied with each other to create a combined more complex waveform.
Granular synthesis basically slices up the waveform or sample into tiny grains, which are then played back in a sequence. The true power of granular synthesis comes from the fact that you can change how many grains you use, the range, play them back at different speeds, phases, volume, and frequency, among many other parameters.
Jan 9, 2024 · In a garden-variety analog synthesizer, an oscillator will generate a saw wave, square wave, sine wave, triangle wave, or noise. In digital synthesizers, the core of the oscillator can be a wavetable or even a recorded sample. The sound sample below is a saw wave — the way you would hear it if you directly tapped the audio output of an analog ...
Sep 29, 2021 · For most of human history, music could only be produced in a limited number of ways. Vibrating or striking a string, for example, as is done with a violin, cello, guitar, piano or hammer dulcimer. Or striking a taut object, perhaps—whether that’s a drum, a marimba, or a xylophone. Or even moving parcels of air through a shaft, as is done with brass and woodwind instruments. In the ...
Apr 1, 2019 · Eurorack refers to the most common (nowadays borderline universal) physical format of modular synth gear. It was originally developed by German manufacturer Doepfer in the early ‘90s. The design included a height of 133.4mm, width measured in HP (1HP = 5.08mm) and connectivity via 3.5mm mono CV cables.
