Possibly unpopular opinion, but IMO to learn a synth it’s best to start with a simple physical subtractive monosynth.
Software synths are often built to model popular hardware instruments in both sound and interface. So learning the basic concepts on a “real” subtractive synth builds a foundation to learn more.
Plus a physical synth is far less distracting than a multitasking device. I find it much easier to create, experiment and learn when a screen is not involved.
Or go a step further and build them yourself. You get to keep the house, but you won't be able to make much use of it because every available space is taken up with a random assortment of wires, op-amps, resistors and capacitors.
DIY synth making will take up every bit of spare time you think you have left, and then some. Your hands will become a puzzle of soldering iron scars, and you'll slowly lose your hearing from accidental speaker pops. You have been warned.
Absolutely! There's a group on FB called 'Eurorack DIY' if anyone's interested in this. Thonk [1] is also the store for you. Lots of DIY kits (before you inevitably embark on the path of building your own modules from scratch!)
There's a guy on YouTube that got me into it which I highly recommend, called 'LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER'. He made a synth organ out of old Furbies toys. From that point I was sold.
Also, as much as I love the Thonk products, don't get put off by the price tags of some of their kits if you're intimidated! Some of my favourite synths have been made from penny parts I got from Alibaba, that totalled about £15 to make. They have a habit of sometimes spontaneously exploding, but that's all part of the fun.
Holy cow that's me! I at least try to save some sanity by doing it with DSP, but constructing instruments from the circuit boards and controls still needs oodles of soldering.
I spent this morning redoing the wiring on two stomp stiches- I had wired them rotated at a 90 degree angle!()
() at least I didn't have to resolder the center terminal...
Implying I care about making music? It's a different hobby all together. They merge to some extent, but I enjoy designing synths much more than I do making music on them.
I enjoy the act of building. A person interested in writing software doesn't have to care about using the software. A person interested in fixing and building kit cars doesn't have to care about driving them. A person working out can be doing it because they enjoy it, not because they care about any end goal. A person baking bread doesn't always have to eat it. A person painting a picture doesn't have to adorn it on the wall when they're done.
There's a lot more to hobbies then just what you get at the finish line. The process is often much more fun than the result at the end of it, or what you can do with that end product.
Non-snarky question: how much music do you finish?
Every time I think about getting more into synths, I worry that I'll just end up endlessly noodling and never actually complete any songs. Years ago, I bought a copy of Reason and had tons of fun playing with it, but eventually I realized that after every session, I was rarely any closer to having a completed work I could share with others.
This question comes up a lot with synths and especially hardware and Eurorack gear.
For me not being focused on finishing anything is what got me back into playing music (and eventually performing live sets).
Previously there was so much pressure to produce end results I couldn't even get started and lost all joy in the process. At some point I got some hardware to just play with and never really looked up how to save anything (was a Drumbrute, Meeblip and I borrowed a Beatstep). Was making odd acid tracks and silly sketches on my kitchen table every night that I'd lose as soon as I turned it all off. It was oddly freeing, and really fun.
A year later I was playing out gigs ranging from 20 mins to 3 hours. And one could even argue that I've still not finished any songs despite hours of recordings and performance as it's mostly improvisational.
Now I'm happily back in the noodling around and having fun stage again and loving it (though about to switch gears again).
Anyway - just figured I'd weigh in as there's often a lot of pressure to finish or record things when just playing around or building weird synths is in and of itself a really really fun (if expensive) hobby and maybe someone needs to hear that. :)
(also perfectly fine if your focus is on complete songs, of course)
I'm going through a sort of mini-midlife crisis right now and one of the things I'm thinking about is whether I can make music part of my life again. I used to be in a rock band and it was tons of fun, but I'm in my 40s with kids so the logistics of rehearsing with other people and playing shows at night make that unlikely.
Another path I'm considering is making electronic music. That's mostly what I listen to and I used to tinker with it before I started a band, so I have some experience with synthesizers, beats, etc. It's much more amenable to my life style now because I can do it after the kids go to bed. But also, back then, I had a lot of trouble getting anything done and often ended up feeling disappointed.
It's not enough for me to just noodle with a synth for a few hours. I want something I can share with other people, which implies to me that I need to be able to finish things. So I'm just trying to figure out strategies for that before I drop money on gear only to have it collect dust.
You don't need much money to get started with a MIDI controller and VSTs, assuming you have a good PC because most people do here on hn.
Even though the hardware people seem like the most outspoken on most forums, I enjoy doing everything in the box now and my hardware mostly just sits under its dust covers.
I have an Ableton Push2 and it's an amazing piece of kit, more like an instrument than a controller. The layout makes much more natural sense to me than a keyboard, I think because I used to play guitar.
I'm the same in that I would like to have something at the end that I can share with other people, but the finishing stuff part I haven't quite worked out.
So far that has required more discipline than I have been able to muster, but I do feel I'm making progress and my workflow is improving.
Yeah, I can definitely afford to sink some money into this. It's more that I'm wired to hate myself if I spend money on something and don't use it. There are few things I despise more than feeling like I'm a poseur.
> Even though the hardware people seem like the most outspoken on most forums,
Of course it's up to you, but if I were you I would just get a controller and just get started. It's never been easier, cheaper or better. If you want to save money you could just get something secondhand from ebay.
I am invested in and love Ableton but there are lots of good options out there.
Like I say, I don't think hardware is necessary these days. It is fun to have dedicated knobs for everything but if you get a good controller it's much more flexible overall.
I can put 10 instruments into a single instrument rack on a track in Ableton and immediately have 8 macro knobs to control whatever I want about all 10 instruments at once.
You can easily do crazy stuff like create mutant instruments that morph between completely different instruments or samples, and change effect settings according to how hard you play the notes, or what part of the bar you're in. The limit is really only your imagination!
Then if you want, you can just duplicate that whole complex track with a single keypress. It's crazy. You can't do that with hardware!
Getting it to sound musical is the hard part, and that's where hardware shines - because you're limited in options, you can usually just turn it on and get a good sound out if it immediately. But IMO that's not a real reason that hardware is better because of course you could limit yourself to that in software too.
You sound like you can afford it and have the desire. I would just buy something and get started. It's heaps of fun, as long as you don't put too much pressure on yourself!
> if I were you I would just get a controller and just get started.
This is basically my plan. Except that I'm deliberately putting it on hold until I'm done with the book I'm writing because I really don't have the time and definitely don't need the distraction.
> It's heaps of fun, as long as you don't put too much pressure on yourself!
But putting pressure on myself is like my #1 personality trait. :)
I'd defininitely agree with the GPs idea of just doing it for the fun of it, and if something finished pops out, great - otherwise it doesn't really matter, you still had fun.
One interesting aspect of the modular thing that hasn't been discussed yet is limitation. With an in-the-box setup with all the plugins it's easy to get lost in the endless choice of what could be done. Each song sounds different because there's no consistency of setup.
With a hardware setup you're usually limited to a small number of devices/modules - this can be very powerful in focussing the mind. Each time you come back to your setup it's the same, but you'll dig a bit deeper to get something else out of it. Eventually you master it and produce the best of what that thing can do.
A lot of great early electronic music came out of limitations. Voodoo Ray was originally going to be called Voodoo Rage, but the sampler had a limited amount of memory left, so he cut off 'Rage' to make it 'Ray'.
It can be argued that the amazing amount of music that comes out of the 'standard band' setup is also a product of limitations.
Joining a band was a revelation because all I had to do was make my bass part sound good and there were relatively limited ways to do that. On top of that, a bass or guitar just sounds pretty nice right "out of the box". With electronic music, I found it took quite a bit of effort to even get to a single sound that sounded rich and satisfying. It felt a lot more like having to be a luthier when all I wanted to do was play. (At the same time, I didn't want to just use presets either, because I didn't want sounds that were too familiar...)
I finish a lot. Although there are degrees of finished. There's having the song recorded where the track is basically complete. Then a version which is basically pollish (accents, fills, tweaks here and there, putting stems through various hardware to make it harmonically more interesting, etc). Then final mix down version. And then mastered.
I have several albums worth of the first stage, doing the pollishing is my weakest stage, the rest is easy.
The hardware actually makes it easier for me to finish tracks because I can usually jam out a whole track on the modular and do a lot of modulation manually or with CV that I would normally find tedious in-the-box. I will sometimes jam out for an hour or so and then find interesting sections to lay out. It's remarkably creative.
Modular is especially good for programmers I think, it's a very systematic way of thinking and it's quite easy to lose yourself in the process of what-if. As soon as something starts sounding repetetive it's trivial to patch in something that modulates it away. Creating self generating patches is especially rewarding, where the system is self modulating and creating controlled randomness.
The sound design aspect of it is fun for its own sake. So, I don't always fire it up just to make music. It will often lead onto me making a track, but it's just fun to see what happens.
For what it's worth I have a few bits (in various stages of completeness) on soundcloud [1]
I'm listening to "Fusion" right now. The drum sounds are fantastic. Nice and tight and punchy. The swing on the hi hat adds a lot too. What are those coming out of?
I don't exactly remember. When I made it, I made four tracks in the same evening. Fusion, Fused, Refuse, and Infusion were all done when I'd just got my new SSL Fusion - and I was putting everything through it to test it out, so it's a bit of a blur what I did!
Among a lot of other kinds of music, I like ambient electronic music.
I go through periods where I just get an okay sound going, and then play with it for 5-10 minutes, and record the stereo bus.
So after a period of this, I usually get 10-12 recordings.
I mean, it's not great. It's not the same as learning a bluegrass tune on banjo and polishing it till I can play it super fast, but I like the results enough to share them with people. So, in this context all the noodling _is_ the completed work.
I became productive with Reason probably around 5 years after I started noodling. Learning the sequencer inside and out was critical, and somehow the less obvious part of the system, as it breaks the physical metaphor - everything else is boxes connecting to other boxes, but the sequencer has no physical representation, no back-side where note lanes connect gate/CV to the synth, just magical software connections.
5 years after that I was releasing stuff that maybe, someone might want to listen to. Could have been a lot quicker with some training as opposed to just continually messing around with it.
I think in another few years I will have something that actually sounds good, sonically. Mastering is the hardest part so far.
Finishing in music is one of the hardest things to do. My approach is to try to write something small every day (I call these daily loops), and then flesh my favorite one of those out into a full song every 1-2 weeks. I find that without some sort of system like that I also go down the noodling rabbit whole and never put anything out.
I have managed to figure out a system for getting writing finished, so an option I'm considering is trying to apply that to music and see how it goes. But I promised myself I wouldn't do that until the current (giant) writing process is done.
i was only thinking about this a few days ago. ive been using reason on and off since version 4 and i have never finished a song!
it was the same when i played guitar. i was never really interested in making music for other people and i got a lot more enjoyment out of just noodling around
I really noticed the difference when I started a band and played bass. With each of us having a single dedicated instrument and feedback from each other, it was a lot easier to make progress and get things done.
For me it was the Make Noise 0-Coast [1], which has many of the West Coast sensibilities. The Neutron (which you'll see I've reskinned in my setup) is a great synth, but is still more of a 'standard' subtractive (East Coast) synth. Although it does have some interesting wave shapes and can produce lots of filthy tones.
Indeed! The rest of the studio (unseen) doesn't help either! Still, it makes me happy, can't put a price on that ... well, it seems you can, but I'm sure you get my point ;)
Sure does! And then the middle rack is my master buss chain: Chandler Curve Bender EQ [1] (the best EQ I've ever heard), Chandler Zener Limiter [2], and then the SSL Fusion [3] - which is a new box from SSL which does lots of lovely things.
I've sold off an Elektron Analog Four, Elektron Analog Rytm, Elektron Octatrack and an Access Virus Ti 2 less than a year ago and started working exclusivley in the box and using two ableton push 2 as midi controllers and I honestly do not miss my hardware at all.
Sure I lose out on some of that analog warmth but I've come pretty close by emulating it with various VSTs.
My personal experience is kind of inbetween. Analogue monosynths are great as a learning because you are stuck with what you have, and can't easily switch to another VST or scroll between endless presets. Their limitations force you to actually learn how to create sounds, and over time you get an intuitive sense of how to tweak each knob and slider just right in order to get the sound you want.
However, VSTs are vastly more convenient and eliminate the annoyances of tuning, physically powering and plugging in a large amount of bulky machines, losing previous specific sounds, and they give you the ability to easily tweak and edit previous recordings. However, you lose the immediate sense of close control over each aspect of the sound.
Ideally, what I would like is a physical MIDI controller with an exact map of my favorite analogue VSTs in terms of knobs and controls. My current keyboard does have a few a customization options, but it's rather awkward to map it to the VST each time, and it's not precisely 1:1 as there's not enough knobs, and they're not laid out or labeled in an intuitive manner.
Also advantages of physical instruments are that you map a mental model to the instrument itself and IF the instrument is built properly and has a good workflow after a while you don't need to look at it, muscle memory translates intent to an action, becomes more intuitive and the flow is uninterrupted. The experience is immediate.
On the other hand, physical synths take a lot of space, break down, are hard to setup if connected together, some require batteries to keep the settings and patches alive and the battery could sometimes be a pain to reach to and change. I had a Yamaha SY-77, which was amazing by the way, the battery failed and the screen was dim. I gave up attempting to replace it myself, it required taking apart most of the screws and the operation itself was a couple of hours.
I started on VSTs but I think i learned a lot more by playing with physical synths and it was way more fun too. I kept them always on and whenever I had an itch to play I didn't have to open a project, click click, choose the instruments, sometimes being phased by so many options that the itch went away. Also sticking with a synth that didn't seem promising at first proved to be very rewarding after all, I'd discover interesting setups that I didn't think were possible. With VSTs I had dozens but can't say I felt like exploring in depth, I had no favorite VST, they all seemed to sound very similar.
VSTS have advantages though. You come back to an old project and want to modify something and bam, everything is setup the way it was when recorded. You make a mistake and you easily go and edit out the mistake without re-recording. All in all I'd say to look at VSTs when you are more production inclined. If you just want to be creative and play and learn at the same time without so many stops to make choices, physical synths are a good investment. Physical synths and a physical mixer!
Elektron have possibly to worst user interfaces of any hardware synths or drum machines that I've used. So much menu diving. I ended up selling my Elektron stuff and will never buy from them again. Most other hardware is much more intuitive and interactive.
I like my MachineDrum. Stuff only goes about 1 level deep. But this Analog Four mkII is driving me crazy because top level functions are not in the "right" places...
To be fair, Elektron boxes and Ableton w/ push 2 have a lot in common. The push provides a similar UI to the octatrack, but expanded and aligned with ableton. Instead of a single row step sequencer/keyboard the push has a grid. And the push has a bigger, but still menu driven screen.
Do you have a Push? I do. I have no idea about an octatrack but I wouldn't agree that the Push is menu driven at all.
There's a dedicated button for almost everything (except for browsing samples, which is something that it would be impossible to have dedicated buttons for).
The great thing about Push is that you sort of make your own UI. If you put an instrument rack on a track then you assign your own macro knobs for whatever you want. It's only if you need to access the devices within that that you need to start navigating around using the (dedicated) buttons.
I was speaking more to learning synths, learning how oscillators sound during detuning, feeling a filter sweep. Feeling out what each step of the subtractive process does with knobs, I would suggest, is a better way to learn.
Those are some pricey synths you’ve rocked, not really a learner’s set-up, especially the Elektron sequencer.
For me, the ms-20 and the feel of tweaking those knobs is what made the feel of really playing a synth come together. Jamming with a friend on drums.
These days, yeah, I actually do most my noodling using the IOS Korg Gadget with my analog keys as a controller/filter bank.
Agreed. For example I never really noticed how expressive the feedback is on a moog until getting one. Once you get the mixer into a sweet spot, the teeniest knob change makes a huge difference in tone.
And so I tried the same thing with the "Monark" VST thinking "yeah analog still wins" and nope, Monark does the exact same thing. But I never discovered it until I actually had the knobs in front of me.
I've since gotten a BCR-2000 and tried mapping all my soft synths but none of them map completely and it's just... not the same somehow. It is better though.
A while ago I recorded two songs (inter alia) that each used a Logic / Garageband synth. I can't perform these songs live without using my laptop. Currently my setup is with a Nord Piano 2 (which does not use Apple synthesisers and there does not appear to be a way to convert to Nord's file format).
Is it possible to go from first principles, starting with a sound that I have in mind (an Apple Logic default synth) and build a similar sounding (digital) synthesiser in some (hopefully open) format that can cross convert?
Cool, thanks. I've seen that sampler on my Nord installation disk but I assumed that there would be some level of loss of quality? Or can the output from the sample engine interpolate cleverly and recreate a faithful (or, at least, high quality) representation?
Honestly, I've never tried it myself. But the default piano sounds you hear on the Nord Piano are essentially multiple high quality samples, so I'd think that as long as you can sample your original synth sounds in sufficiently high quality, they should sound pretty good.
Not necessarily unpopular but kind of a hassle. If you need to go through all that trouble just to learn something you might end up not being interested in seems a tad much. Software is definitely the way to go for the vast majority.
Software synths are often built to model popular hardware instruments in both sound and interface. So learning the basic concepts on a “real” subtractive synth builds a foundation to learn more.
Plus a physical synth is far less distracting than a multitasking device. I find it much easier to create, experiment and learn when a screen is not involved.