Synth Beginners

sup dudes,

I wanted to share a document for anyone beginning learning how to program subtractive synths. The document was made for a summer course on sound design that I taught last year for high schoolers. I made the document after reading Gordon Reid's Synth Secrets, which is another very useful (but difficult) resource for learning subtractive synthesis. The document walks through making flute, brass, string, piano, and percussion patches on a Sequential Prophet 6, but it should be useful for any analog synth that has at least two oscillators. 

Hope someone finds this useful!

Handout for Patching the Prophet 6.pdf 135.6 kB · 26 downloads

Nice job, thanks for sharing.

Got a P6 so cheers dude 

Very cool refresher. Also a random tip for any beginner who might be reading this, always have an oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer open whenever you're working on any sound. It takes a while but you'll eventually learn to intuit what something sounds like just by looking at the audio spectrum, and visualize what turning a knob can do to the spectrum.

Here's a free signal analyzer:

http://www.vst4free.com/free_vst.php?plugin=Signal_Analyzer&id=1627

 

I learned subtractive on the Nord G2 Modular Demo (and Tassman, but that's not free), and still think it's a great way to teach/learn.

Some synths aren't explicit with how things work internally, so you get a really good understanding of how they work when you manually put everything together.

Not sure if this still works for modern computers, but it's worth a shot: https://www.nordkeyboards.com/downloads/legacy/nord-modular-g2