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by spinchange
1991 days ago
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Apple's Logic Pro User Guide page on FM Synthesis: "The DX7, sold from 1983 to 1986, remains the most commercially successful professional-level hardware synthesizer ever made." https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/frequency-modulatio... How do you get good bells and brass or as punchy bass sounds from subtractive-only synthesis? "According to Dave Smith, founder of the synthesizer company Sequential, 'The synthesizer market was tiny in the late 70s. No one was selling 50,000 of these things. It wasn't until the Yamaha DX7 came out that a company shipped 100,000-plus synths'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_DX7#cite_note-:7-16 |
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Quick answer: modulation (primarily oscillator modulation but also filter and amplitude modulation.)
Analog brass is great already, but for metallic (or sometimes woody) sounds oscillator sync, cross modulation and/or analog FM, and ring modulation are your friends.
You can also get some pretty jarring sounds out of pulse width modulation, some tinkly bells out of sine and triangle waves, and "punchy" basses out of square and sawtooth waves. I hear a lot of pretty raw sawtooth-derived basslines and leads. Stacked waves of different shapes can also be interesting.
It also depends on your oscillators. Many subtractive synths will feature analog filters attached to flexible oscillators that can generate waves other than classic waveforms.