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^^^ 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. |