
The Synthesizer Academy - evo_9
http://synthesizeracademy.com/
======
duffdevice
I dunno, the classic Sound On Sound "synth secrets" covers all this and more,
in a lot more detail IMO

[http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/allsynthsecrets.htm](http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/allsynthsecrets.htm)

~~~
maldusiecle
Yeah, a lot of this information is pretty low-value relative to the Sound On
Sound stuff. What good is it to know the difference in how a square wave and
triangle wave look, if you don't understand how they sound different and why
you might prefer one to the other? The "synth secrets" series is much more
technical and showing its age, but it's comprehensive.

~~~
DrPhish
It also helps to have a real or soft synth in front of you so you can tweak
knobs and play around as you go If you don't have anything, my recommendation
is ZynAddSubFX. It is an amazing free synth with enough knobs to do almost
anything

------
sethhochberg
A fascinating read that I rarely see mentioned in these kind of threads is
Rick Snoman's Dance Music Manual - for anyone interested in synths and their
role in electronic music, it provides tons of information on the
when/where/why/how various synth techniques became popular in different styles
of dance music and gives good introductory information on how to take the raw
synth components you can create in software or hardware (waveforms, filters,
envelopes, etc) and turn them into the kinds of sounds common in various dance
music genres.

The book is written with a slant towards the aspiring dance music producer,
but, it should be plenty interesting for anyone who wants to have a bit more
musical interest in synthesis beyond the purely mathematical angle.

~~~
gtani
I love that book, covers the whole chain of tools including samplers,
sequencers, arpeggiators, DAWs etc. Also Shepard "Refining Sound" steps people
thru oscillators, LFO's, envelope, filter/resonance and after effects. Great
books.

Some other classic books are Welsh's Cookbooks (i think there are 2), and
those by Miller Puckette (the guy who wrote Max), Martin Russ, Perry Cook,
Allen Strange, Mark Jenkins, Mark Vail. I'm forgetting a few.

Or you could just buy a mopho/tetra, microbrute, bass station2, MS20 mini,
ms2000, minilogue, sh201, jp8000 etc and start watching youtube tuts.

------
adamnemecek
The hands down best way to learn about synthesis is Syntorial
[http://syntorial.com](http://syntorial.com). It's paid but it's well worth
it.

~~~
FreeFull
Syntorial looks like it will teach you how to use existing synthesis software,
but won't be that useful if you want to write your own?

~~~
adamnemecek
How do you want to write your own without understanding how synthesis works?

~~~
EC1
I hope he tries his hand at building an AM analogue synth.

~~~
kbob
I started on that journey about 18 months ago. It took me five months to have
a useful software instrument, and I've spent the remaining time learning how
to fab a suitable hardware controller.

Within the software, the hardest parts were understanding and controlling
aliasing and getting a virtual ladder filter to perform well.

I already knew how to play piano, had a little music theory, and had spent a
few hours playing with other people's analog synths.

------
huuu
If you like this I can recommend you to look into the raw audio format [1]. It
is a very simple format but it helped me a lot to learn about digital audio.

Just take your fav programming language (I took PHP) and write some bits to a
file:

    
    
      $file = fopen('output.s16', 'w');
      $amp = returnANiceSynthValue();
      fwrite($file, pack('s', $amp));
    

[1] [http://www.fmtz.com/misc/raw-audio-file-
formats](http://www.fmtz.com/misc/raw-audio-file-formats)

------
shams93
Yeah actually the csound manual not only has all this and more but csound is
open source and free all the examples run right there in the browser thanks to
asm.js and can be run locally, but this seems like a nice intro for synth
beginners who may only have a hardware synth for reference.

~~~
laurentoget
i would be a great moment to post a link to it.

------
ninjakeyboard
thanks - this looks really good (as a producer - www.soundcloud.com/decklyn )

Bookmarked - will read!

