Ableton Forum

Hey Guys, are there any books/tutorial/video tutorial on how to make any sound on a synth? Any suggestion is greatly appreciated! Thanks!!

turn the knobs till it sounds good.

2 years

Truthfully, a good ear and knowledge about your synth.

practice, practice , practice and more practice

on top of spending lots of time making your own patches from scratch, you might spend some time studying patches you like, dissecting them so to speak, to see how they get certain sounds and effects. the presets on some synths (the Virus for example) are full of good techniques.

-Luddy

I'm at a point where i can pretty much build a sound i can hear in my head on either my ion or the nova.
These are both classic configuration virtual analogues.
Operator still leaves me a little baffled, but i can get there in the end.

The part that was the hardest for me to grasp, as far as synth programing in general goes, were how best to use the synths modulation matrixes.
The nova is a cake walk in this regard, the ion is a bit tougher and operator can seem quite straight forward, but as soon as you start using the FM capabilities all a sudden it starts doing things i'm not quite able to understand just yet.

Any ways..
I got to where i'm at simply by finding sounds close to what i wanted as a pre-set then tearing them down to see how they work.
I'm a bit of a dork, so i wrote a whole bunch of stuff down in a book too .

Having said all of this, i would never consider my self to be a "sound designer"

hard work, patience, the ability to listen, good tools that you understand, luck, reverse engineering.

sound on sound magazine has some interesting online articles about synth sound design

and you might get the demo software for the G2 at clavia.se and the associated tutorials that are linked there.. or in the G2 section of electro-music.com.. or the nord modular book of jj.clarke http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~clark/nordmod ... k_toc.html
and you will know a big deal about sound design with synth..

other way is trying... a good basic source are the manuals of the sequential circuits pro one or some other classical american synth´s..
the japanese manuals from that time suffer a bit from the loss in translation..but they are funny

i found these to be extremely helpful, and even though they are circle-specific you can apply this logic to any synth
http://www.futureaudioworkshop.com/circle/tutorials

nice tutorials from a nice synth. circle is great to learn how synths work with all it's visual infos.

the tutorials are quite inspiring. i love the sample'n'hold demo, as i love rex

4.33 wrote:i found these to be extremely helpful, and even though they are circle-specific you can apply this logic to any synth
http://www.futureaudioworkshop.com/circle/tutorials

thank you for the link

aisling wrote:

4.33 wrote:i found these to be extremely helpful, and even though they are circle-specific you can apply this logic to any synth
http://www.futureaudioworkshop.com/circle/tutorials

thank you for the link

usefull.

This is usefull information, I'm going to download the demo version of Circle and have a play around tonight, looks interesting for a beginner!