Synth Secrets // From The Basics to Programming Like a Pro

We'll start with basses from a simple sawtooth wave to some huge Reece Basses, PWM fat tones and simple electric bass type sounds as well as more electronic tones.

Gorgeous Pads are beautifully simple to create - jus a few tweaks from an initial patch of you know what to do.  Use these as the basis for all your future pad experiments.

Just a tweak or two from a pad.. reducing the envelope times and creating intervals between oscillators.. hey presto there some organ tones.  Reed organs and classic house tones.

Plucks and poly sounds.. some basics again to get you started. Its all about the envelopes here and manipulating the sustain level, decay time and amount of envelope to make a transient plucks or flatter poly tones.

More of an appendix here - but we've talked about filters a lot, and used the Low Pass on everything so far. But there are different types and this is what they do.  Just a quick one - there's a while other course coming on filters in particular... yes it can go that deep!

You've heard it countless times - but may not know what it is or how to make it.  Syncing two oscillators creates. whole host of new harmonics.  Modulate with an envelope for classic 'Tom Sawyer' leads or daft punk tones.

How do you get metallic tones, complex bells or make those basses dirty.  Add some FM. It's easier to demo than explain in words so dig right in.

And then there's ring mod.  It produces the sum and difference of 2 oscillators. What does that mean... in harmonic and growling basses.  Lovely.  Its what gives the Arp Odyssey its dirty tones.  and TAL can do it!

Getting a bit deeper here... but if your synth is behaving differently than TAL its normally because there's 2 main types of modulation - unipolar where the signal is only ever positive (adds to the original setting) and bipolar where the signal goes up and down. 

Every synths its own special trick. TAL has a complex envelope (you'll find something similar on lots of stuff) so you can create really interesting modulations and develop a tone over time or add swinging wah wahs :)

A quirky here..  you'll have heard the phrase, but this is what it does.  Check out my Odyssey video on YouTube for a really in depth demo of the concepts., but this will get you going.

A quick listen to some of the more complex presets on TAL.. and demoing how we can now unpick what's happening and tweak to suit if need be.  This will help you to do the same on whatever synths you have and help things fit a mix perfectly.

The Prophet 6 is a modern VCO classic.  Beautiful sounding and here I demo the basics from the tutorials, plus how to make an analog kick.  The distortion on this creates some amazing kicks!

The Arp Odyssey is a bit confusing when you first get your hands on it, but using the skills we've learned over the course it should be easy enough to pock up now.   Here it is doing those bass tones, some sync and the ring mod its famous for.

Some synths don't have everything I've demo'd. This doesn't have PWM, but it does have a weird patch bay on which I show some basics here. A bit of sample and hold using the Patchbay is quite fun!

An odd little synth this one.  It looks strange and has weird modulation interface, but when you take a minute to follow what's going on .. its the same as all the others! And sounds great too. Apparently it was Vince Clarkes first synth.

A modern semi-modular classic. Its got all the same basic modules, can be super flexible and I show some basic patching here bringing in the High Pass Filter, plus some sync and a basses.

Oh what a gorgeous sound.  This is great for pads, which I demo here using the same basic techniques described in the tutorials. I then add some nice notch filtering and modulate that with the LFO.  Sounds complex, but you should be able to follow if you've watched everything else.