Ask HN: Introduction to Analog Synthesizers (Simulation OK)

+1 for Miller Puckette’s book (and Pd) - might be a bit hardcore as an intro. for some, but if you’re technically inclined it’d be a great overview… If the second option is more important, there’s no substitute for messing about starting to get familiar with how different primitive oscillators/filters sound in subtractive synthesis maybe first, then moving on to explore other types from there… (FM for example is less intuitive) …recreating/ researching your favourite sounds from records, synth internals, or just trying to make whatever you’ve dreamt of/heard in your head/twiddling ‘til you find something you like and then trying to work out what makes it sound cool… (‘The Computer Music Tutorial’ is a beast of a book, if you wanted an all-in-one reference: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/computer-music-tutorial )

This! Omri is amazing. I've been watching his videos since the pandemic started and taught myself modular using VCV from scratch. I even bought a few modules :)

VCV is an amazing tool, seriously amazing. I would have never dove into modular without it as the cost to entry is just too high. VCV also nice because you can play with what you want and just ditch it if you don't like it. Can't say that when you buy a $550 module.

Highly recommend VCV + Omri videos.

It's regularly sold at a 50% discount, so if you aren't in a hurry you can just wait for a deal to come around (though it's that price at adsr currently).

This is an excellent resource! I recommend starting here as a beginner.

I saw some lecture videos this guy put up years ago (nearly a decade now), lost the link and couldn't rememeber his name.

Thanks for this

YES! Lanterman's courses are excellent.

I particularly loved how he was able to be vulnerable and admit that, even with a PhD in EE/CS, he had no idea what was happening in most circuits when he started.

Mad props to that. I don't know a lot of PhDs who'd cop to not knowing something.

Wow, thank you so much for posting this. I didn't know it exists and watching the introduction made me want to watch the entire course.

This look amazing! Thanks for sharing, sounds like yarh (yet another rabbit hole) that I wanna pursue! :-)

Looks interesting!

I've been interested in audio. I have no electronics background, so I am overwhelmed by the topic. I find there's a lot I don't understand, and a lot of tutorials online don't quite give me an understanding I'm looking for.

If anyone is looking to be inspired (rather than be informed, necessarily), check out the crazy English guy (is there any other sort?) who runs the channel Look Mum No Computer: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCafxR2HWJRmMfSdyZXvZMTw

He's got quirky things like a Furby Organ, a 1000 oscillator megadrone, and a cryptocurrency synthesiser. He is also opening a museum soon: The Museum Of Everything Else, dedicated to old music and electronic stuff. It even includes a telephone exchange and his Googol clock, which he plans to never turn off. He also has a flamethrower synth, which he uses indoors. And he has a safety pin for an earring.

Love it.

^^^ Underrated comment. There really is no substitute here for hands on experience.

I got back into making music during the pandemic, partly as a deliberate choice where I turned my formerly chaotic and cluttered office/music room into something actually usable, but also through watching a lot of YouTube videos, researching, listening, and looking for a synth to buy.

The key is to get something with all physical controls so you get that immediacy of feedback in terms of the sound changing. You can hear the effect of switching between different wave forms, playing with the pulse width, maybe using an LFO to modulate pulse width, applying a filter and so on. Avoid anything that involves menu diving or relies heavily on a touch screen where you're not getting realtime feedback.

Analogue synthesis is super-popular at the moment so bargains are hard to come by - you are not going to get a used Prophet of any era for a couple of hundred quid, and basically forget anything vintage - but you can get some really good synths for not that much money, particular if you go the monosynth route. The Arturia MicroBrute is great, for example. They're about £260 new and I've seen them for £160 - 200 used on Reverb and eBay. If you're happy to spend a bit more, something like the Behringer Deepmind 6 packs a lot of punch for about £400, and the Deepmind 12 is available for around £600. (Behringer had a sketchy reputation for quality but their synth division seems to absolutely nail it - I have a TD-3, which is a clone of the original Roland TB-303, that costs about £100 new as opposed to £3-4000 for an OG 303 on the used market. Sounds spot on. Couldn't be happier.)

I'd also recommend easing yourself into it. One day I'll get into modular (it's inevitable) but I'm not there yet, and it would have been a mistake to start there as it would have been a bit overwhelming for me. You might be different but I'd say get something that, again, gives you results and immediacy - something that you can tinker around and learn and have fun with, and then take that knowledge and use it with other synths.

Sorry, not really a tutorial, but there are plenty on YouTube, which will help, but what you really needs is hands on time with synths, and lots of it. Try programming patches that you've heard on different tracks you like from scratch. For example, I really felt like I was getting somewhere when I managed to program a decently credible Tom Sawyer bass patch with a really dirty vintage-ised filter sweep. It's one of the few events during the last lockdown that brought me some proper joy.

And that's really the final piece of advice: have fun and don't be afraid to experiment. You will probably create some really awful sounds, along with some really interesting ones, but just embrace it all as part of the journey.

I appreciate that because it is the kind of thing I might say.

But I am not that committed. At least yet.

I try to avoid starting by shopping when I can. This seems like one of those. A browser is probably enough to gauge the stickiness of my current interests and avoids figuring about where to put “the damn thing.”

Or to put it another way, I give this kind of interest time. It might have been awesome to have lived circumstances that encouraged my interest of forty five years ago. But I don’t let that put me on a rush.

I would second this general idea, but I don‘t know about the Analog 4 specifically? Out of all the analog synths it is the most like a little computer. It‘s awesome but doesn‘t feel like a learning tool. There are a lot of synths that kind of have the signal flow laid out on the front panel, like a Korg Monologue. That seems helpful.

I know $900-$1500 is "cheap" for most of the HN crowd, but for the rest of us there's hardware synth options that are much cheaper! For example, the Korg Volca Keys [1] is a perfectly suitably synth to learn the basics of analog synthesis and can make some nice sounds to boot. YOu can get it for $150 new or even less used. (And of course, there's plenty of free software synths, as others have linked in other posts here). [1] https://www.korg.com/us/products/dj/volca_keys/

The Analog Four has a huge range but I don’t think it’s particularly beginner friendly due to the large array of parameters accessed by just 10 knobs. Its flexibility also means it has fewer “sweet spots” than simpler synths - it’s not as easy to make something that sounds great by messing with a few knobs compared to e.g. the Roland SH01A.

I think for a beginner it’s more helpful to have as many controls as possible accessible hands on, rather than having to go to different pages and have different knobs do different things depending on context.

Analog Four is awesome as you get more experienced though as you can create a whole track on it if you are creative!

I’d personally probably go for a Korg Minilogue as a beginner these days…

The Moog Grandmother is an extremely easy analog synth - my kids know how to use it

I second the Syntorial recommendation. You can get a number of lessons as a free introduction and it’s a very hands on approach that allows you to “get your hands dirty” as others have suggested.

A thousand times yes. You can read all the tutorials you want, but the ear training that Syntorial offers is really worth it.

Getting "the sound in your head" coming out of the machine takes lots of practice, but this really, really gives you a running start.

Seconding this recommendation. As long as you have a basic understanding of electric components he's really easy to follow and does a great job of explaining how the circuits work.

I had an Omni 2 that almost set my apartment on fire (the synth itself was lost), it's not such a collectors item today as the 2600 but beware when buying/restoring this old equipment that some of the parts are well over their predicted life span and that can cause trouble. I tracked the start of the fire down to a tantalum cap, and recreating the conditions that it was under fairly reliably caused these to burst into flame.

So if you go the route of buying a broken one and restoring it make sure you refresh all of the caps that are across the voltage rails (of which there are quite a few).

This is lots of fun, thanks for finding it.

Thanks for the clarification.

I know that there is a semantic difference in technical contexts. It doesn’t bother me. It’s a true-enough Scotsman.

The distinction for me is with sampling synths (which can also, though rarely be analog)…I mean I have a forty plus year passing interest and the personality to gravitate to HN.

I am more interested in the empirical part. And digital has some practical advantages like using my iPhone.

Generally it means they're simulating analog synth components in software; i.e. starting with oscillators producing stuff like triangle or sawtooth waveforms, running it through high pass and low pass filters and an amplitude envelope, throwing in some low-frequency oscillators controlling various parameters, adding some effects like reverb at the end.

That way you're doing the same stuff you would in a pure analog synth, and getting similar sounds. In the digital realm there are lots of other ways to make sounds: FM, additive, samples, physical modeling, etc.

Pure analog synth hardware had fallen out of favor by the turn of the century but since then it's made a comeback.

Underdog really amazed me with their videos over the past few months! Quality tips and tricks.