The sound you can't get out of your filter
You're working on a track and hear a sound in your reference that you can't recreate: a glassy bell that dies away into a breathing cloud of texture. You open your trusted synth, pick a saw, turn the cutoff and drag envelopes around. It gets warm, it gets thick, but it never becomes glass. That's not down to your skill, and not to your synth either. It's the method: subtractive synthesis is one of many ways to make sound, and some sounds are beyond its reach.
What you learn in this chapter
- You distinguish five major synthesis methods conceptually: wavetable, FM/PM, additive, granular and physical modeling.
- You choose a method based on the behavior you're after, not on genre habits.
- You use modulation to make timbre move over time, with the right parameter for each method.
- You reduce every complex sound to three questions: which source, which movement, which processing.
Who this chapter is for
For anyone who wants to go beyond clicking through presets and wants to understand why a sound does what it does. Recommended prior knowledge is Chapter 14 (Synthesis Fundamentals): we use concepts like oscillator, filter, envelope and LFO here without building them up again. If you're missing a concept, you'll find it in the free intro lessons of earlier modules.
A preview of the core idea
Every synthesis method answers the same two questions: how is the spectrum created, and how does that spectrum move over time. Subtractive answers: start rich and filter away. Wavetable answers: sweep through a stack of waveforms. FM answers: let one oscillator shape the spectrum of the other. Additive answers: build the spectrum sine by sine. Granular and physical modeling answer: start from existing audio or from a vibrating model and let it live. Five methods, five answers, and none of them is tied to a genre. In the next lessons you get to know them one by one, always with your ears first.