/musicprod/ - Music Production

>>660

This. Synth1 is a great one, although personally it took me a while to get into as it was one of the first VSTs I really bothered learning.

Something like Fruity DX10 would be a nice introduction if you have FL Studio and like plinky FM sounds.

OP, tell us what DAW you're using so we can suggest specifics.

>>653

in my opinion, the two best are Harmor, and Serum.

Don't limit yourself to one synth.

>>660

are there any controls ?

>>663

I have fl studio, I also downloaded synth1 and sylenth

>>671

I actually think it's a good idea. Plenty of artists set boundaries and limitations to push themselves and stay focused. Know one synth extremely well rather than knowing a dozen synths moderately well. This can be applied to compressors/EQs/etc as well and I think it's important to at least consider for yourself.

>>684

Sounds good in white text on blue-ish background, but I don't think it would do most people much good to limit yourself to one synth. Maybe limitations in other areas can be a good thing, and then you can slowly expand when you feel you've mastered everything within those limitations, but I doubt a synth is a good example of this, and I've never heard of it before.

>>689

arent most synths generally the same thing ?

What would u use particular synth for vs another ?

>>696

Nah, many vastly different synths out there, both in terms of sound and functionality. One synth, if programmed correctly, could in theory reproduce any sound, but only sounds with one attack, one sustain and one release. It's another story if you can program arps and stuff. Then there's functionality. A synth that can literally reproduce any sound would undoubtedly be a pain in the ass to work with, maybe even impossible for simple little humans. So each synth has its own set of limitations. Then there's the difference between subtractive and additive synths. Presets will differ, the amount of knobs and what exactly they do will differ, even if they're labelled the same, etc.

Harmor and Sylenth1 will never sound exactly the same, and some synths will be better at replicating an orchestra, for example, than others. Some synths are better for huge and/or subtle pads (Omnisphere maybe) and others are better for 80s-sounding bleeps and bloops, hard and edged.

>>703

not >>696 here

but thanks for the post,I am going search for a pdf or something like it,synths looks so interesting and fun.Want to master a good one.

>>696

>aren't most synths the same thing

Fuck no. There are several types of synth. I shall list the different types here.

Subtractive - This is where you take a bunch of waves of different shapes, and stack them together in different pitches, and use filters, to create a wave shape. Most analog synths work this way. If you've got Triangle, Square, Saw, etc waves, and multiple oscillators, It's probably subtractive.

Additive- Additive synths are hard to do right. They take literally HUNDREDS of sine waves and stack them together on hundreds of different pitches, to shape the audio-spectrum of the sound, regardless of the visible shape of the waveform. Harmor is a very excelent example of this, it's a 512 band additive synth. It can also still re-create MOST basic waveforms, including saw and square, based on what harmonics it's using.

FM - Frequency Modulation. This takes One oscilator, called an Operator, and Changes it's pitch, based on the amplitude of another operator. How much it does this, and on what envelope is also controlled. Modulating pitch at a rate that is also an audible pitch, has many complex results. Examples of this Include Sytrus, FM8, DX7, Toxic Biohazard, and a multitude of digital analog synths.

RM - Ring Modulation. This is functionally the same principal as FM, it is also known as AM or Amplitude Modulation. It works like FM except instead of modulating the Frequency, you are modulating the amplitude, thus changing the shape of the wave.

>For the record, Sytrus is 6 oscilators (subtractive), each oscilator is 100 bands of additive, and each oscilator is an operator, for both FM and RM. This is why Sytrus is a staple in my earlier suggested synths list

>Harmor on the other hand is 512 bands of additive, with 2 channels, and can convert recorded sounds INTO additive sounds, Meaning you can record sytrus's output, drop that into harmor, and manipulate it as a complex additive sound. It can also use that sound like a psudo-wavetable. this is collectively why it's also on the list.

Wavetables - Wavetables work similar to Subtractive synths. you are just stacking 2 or more wave shapes, except what that shape is, is from a table or list of waves which you can cycle through. Massive and Serum are the two best examples of this. Serum is the better of the two as you can create your own wavetables. Wavetables also have the ability to bend/reshape the waves in ways unique to wavetables. such as bending/shifting the middle or edge of a given cycle.

PWM - Pulse Width Modulation., Take a square wave. you've got up , and you've got down, for a finite amount of time. PWM lets you controll how long for each. people don't typically use this much anymore unless they're going retro or doing chiptunes, or they're using it as more than JUST PWM.

Granular - This takes a sample, chops it up into slices or "grains" and re-aranges them, loops them, fades them in and out (crossfade), and creates complex textures. I have no good examples of granular synths.

I highly recommend Sytrus, and Harmor, possibly serum if you can wrap your head around it.

Sytrus is extremely versatile and can be used as multiple types of synth, and harmor and serum both are incredibly powerful on their own, but can also be used as post effects as well as synths.

There is currently nothing that compares fully to harmor in terms of methods of how much it can do and the ways in which it does it. Serum is much the same, but does different things.

>>706

Omnisphere 2 features a rad granular synth.

>>709

this reminds me.

I also forgot to mention another type of synth.

>Physical Modeling

Physical modeling uses lots and lots of complex math that is all "under the hood". you don't see what exactly it's doing, but different combinations of variables are connected to the different knobs that are referenced as what they are meant to simulate,

For instance, String thickness/tightness, Pickup placement, Body shape, Body material, string material, etc.

the only physical modeling I've seen are for Strings and Drums.

For FL there is Pluck (Super minimal string, 2 knobs lol), Sakura (Holy shit I can't even) and Drummax (drum physical modeling. I use this one a lot as well)

>>709

also also

>Omnisphere 2

Looking at this… it mentions wavetables as well, and in a way, wavetables and granulars aren't too far off from eachother, the difference is almost entirely 100% in grain size. WT synths are basically Granulizers that are locked to 1 wave cycle…. so if you made a sample that was, say…. C8, and told syrum that it was C0, you'd get 9 cycles per…. cycle., which means not a perfect wavetable, but you could mess with the pitch even more and "play" it at negative octaves or… something. I dunno… you get what I'm getting at I hope.

I might try to use Serum and Harmor as granulars by cycling through chunks of audio / wavetables, on loop, with a separate volume envelope, see if I can't get some good granular-like effects that way… That… gave me some ideas.

Also, Fun fact, the best granular sound samples are machines, not instruments. Car engines, car crashes, stepper motors, blenders, automatic seatbelts… That's 100% of how they made all the noises in the michael bay transformers movies. that was in fact all 100% granular synth with some phasers and layering, all sampling car noises. I've just never been able to actually do it because I've never really considered much of how granular synths actually WORK, and haven't bothered to try to find anything better than "Fruity granulizer" and now realize that "oh… i can *probably* do that in serum or harmor…"

Just throwing that out there to the ephemeral void of the internet.

>>706

>>713

>>714

Great description

Will all the synths provided by FL studio (best edition) be adequate in covering most of the major synthesis types ?

And are there any synths within fl studio that I should just ignore or replace ?

Ill probably learn harmor first, is that a good idea ?

>>716

by "FL studio (best edition)" I'm going to assume you mean the all plugins bundle, and not the signature bundle.

So i'm gonna go down the list of what instruments it includes, and a few effects, and I am going to put in parenthesis next to the name, what type(s) of synth it is, as well as mark which one *I* think is the best.

Fruity Granulizer (Granular synth) [obtuse, minimally functional, but it is functional]

3X OSC (Subtractive)

Autogun (???? additive?) (super laggy preset library, can't be edited at all. it's 100% dumb luck to make it sound good. there are more presets than can be heard in several lifetimes) [AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE]

Bass Drum (?)

Beepmap (additive) [converts images into sound. primitive version of image synthesis in harmor]

Drumpad (Physical modeling) [very very versitile. Use this if you want a non 808/909, non-sampled drum]

Drumaxx (physical modeling) [Multiple instances of drumpad bundled into one plugin]

>[the best synth drum that isn't analog, and it isn't a sample library. steep learning curve, difficult to master, can be rewarding]

Fruity Kick (?)

Fruity DX10 (Vintage FM) [3 operator FM. Super limited, based on vintage 80's FM hardware keyboards]

Grove machine (effects?)

Grove machine synth (???)

Harmless (Additive) [a primitive harmor with half the features gone]

Harmor (Additive, can be used as psudo-Wavetable without bending)

>[THE BEST ADDITIVE SYNTH ON MARKET AT PRESENT IMO. absolutely massive number of knobs, custom shape. very long, gradual learning curve, a mountain of things to figure out, but each one on its own is fairly easy]

minisynth (not familiar)

Morphine (additive) [out-dated. can be seen as another proto-harmor. basically, Morphine + ogun + harmless + beepmap, plus a few other considerations, and you eventually get something that resembles harmor, which renders all of these mostly worthless now]

Ogun (additive) [THE ONLY NON-HARMOR ADDITIVE THAT STILL HAS VALUE. MORE HARMONICS, but more fiddly and less detailed controll. Primary value comes from its presets, mostly the metalic ones.]

Poizone (subtractive) [virtual vintage synth]

Sakura (Physical modeling) [THE BEST FOR PHYSICAL MODELING FOR STRINGS]

>THE BEST PHYSICAL MODELING FOR STRINGS AND WEIRDNESS. Very confusing, you might think you figure out what a knob does, and change another knob and it un-does the sound, and the previous knob won't do the same thing. it's very convoluted, but making endless tweaks to presets can yield good results]

Sawer (subtractive) [more virtual vintage synth]

Toxic Biohazard (FM) [clunky, outdated. Sci-fi-GUI vomit, sytrus is better]

Wasp (subtractive) [how many of these fuckers are there]

Sytrus (Subtractive, Additive, FM, RM)

>Sytrus is the best at Subtractive by virtue of 6 osc,

>the best FM,

>and the only RM in this lot

>>717

and now I'm going to talk in more detail about things I think are important to point out

>Drummax / Drumpad

if you want realistic drums, use a sample

if you want a specific genres sound, Use a sample. Most likely it will be an 808 or a 909, which drumsynth live can handle the full kits and customize them fairly well. there are also free VSTs out there that do that.

There's also other vintage synth drums, Like the linn drum that Prince used which is pretty sweet.

But if you don't want a "real" drum, and you don't want the same, by this point stock, 808/909 sound, Drumaxx and drumpad are best. If you want "real" drums, get superior drummer or something. if you want to do DNB/breakcore, use Slicex with drumloops and a pile of effects.

If you're using Drumaxx/drumpad, to decide which to use: If you want all your drums in the same FX channel, Use drumaxx. If you want each drum to go through a different effects chain, use multiple instances of drumpad. They are identical.

>Sakura

I said it's convoluted, simply by virtue of looking at it as a synth. Normally with a synth, a knob will have a specific consistent thing that it does, for instance a lowpass filter always works the same way if it's however steep, and has whatever resonance. That's not how physical modeling works however.

Imagine it like… a character generator, for something like skyrim. Except instead of a character, you're making a physical instrument. It has a body size, there's the hole in the body and you control how big it is and what shape it is, and you control things like neck length, and string type, and all this has an effect on the sound, and all those attributes effect eachother. you have to sort of imagine in your head what changing those parts of your instrument would do to the sound, rather than think about what a random knob on a synth would do. When you go at ANY PHYSICAL MODELING SYNTH this way

>INCLUDING DRUMPAD/DRUMAXX

then you'll be able to wrap your head around what a knob does way faster. you will never understand what's happening "under the hood" it's literally pages of calculus and multiple stacked formulas in parallel.

you can get some very nice sounds, or you can get the infamous "FL Slayer" sound.

I'd like to point out, It seems that "FL Slayer" has in fact been totally removed from FL.

>FL Slayer has been removed

>FL Still has BooBass and FL Keys, but Slayer has been removed.

That should tell you how bad FL Slayer was. admittedly, you could get some good sounds out of it, but it took a lot of work, and external distortion, AND cabinet simulation, and even then it still sounded fake as shit. it can only be described as "toy guitar noises"

>autogun

autogun, is basically Ogun. it is a library of 4294967296 Ogun presets, that you cannot change.

yes.

4,294,967,296

four billion two hundred ninety four milion nine hundred sixty seven thousand two hundred and ninety six presets

to quote the store page

>If you listen to 1 preset, every second, 24 hours a day, it will take you over 136 years to complete this task.

and all but about 3 of the sounds I have EVER heard come out of it, have been "meh" at best. it is the fools errand of synths. because you literally never know what you're going to get, and it's the musical equivilent of hitting randomize on oblivion, but you can't customize it other than adding effects to the mixer channel, this plugin is garbage.

Ogun on the other hand, has a plugin browser, with sounds categorized, and you can *gasp* edit them. Harmor is better by virtue of all the things it can do that ogun can't, but ogun has… fewer things you can do to fuck up. but harmor is still easy to use.

Basically what I'm saying is, Ogun is the lazy hipster cousin to harmor. It has some decent metal sounds though. and by metal I mean the sound of things made of metal, not the genre of metal.

>>718

and finally the TL:DR version

of all the different things that can be loaded including samplers, I use the following

Sytrus

Harmor

Drumaxx/Drumpad

Drumsynth live

Slicex

Sakura

DirectWave

default sampler

>Effects

EQ-2

WaveShaper

Fruity Limiter

Maximus

Fruity Convolver

Reverb 2

Patcher

vocoder

vocodex

Newtone (non-effect auto-tune)

Edison (for recording within FL to re-sample, and for some effects that can only be done this way, such as "pre-verb", or as edison calls it 'blur')

Layer (yes, the layer plugin. it is super usefull for some things, like per-note control of effects envelopes. better than manually drawing the envelopes following along the midi)

–Third party plugins.

–for 99% of other things like phaser, I have no preference and will just use whatever the stock versions are. the things I do NOT use FL stock for are bit-crushers, glitch effects, piano sounds, and chiptune stuff. and even then I use freeware.

and that's quite literally 100% of what I use. with the exception of doing chiptune, or if I get the rare urge to emulate specific hardware, This is everything that I use, and everything on this list I do use.

though I may start using Serum soon, but Serum is 3rd party, from xfer. because FL doesn't have a true wavetable. closest it has is Harmor, which isn't literal wave recreation, and lacks bend/morph

I might also use Fruity Scratcher as a joke

>>718

Time for me to update my own thoughts on something

>Ogun Vs Harmor

I actually thought they worked the same way.

I just fiddled about with ogun, actually understanding what additive synthesis is like this time and…. jesus fucking christ this is not what I was expecting. First of all this has WAY more bands than harmor. and second, they aren't linked exclusively to expected pitches and harmonics.

In harmor you can get a-tonal sounds out by shifting the pitch of each additive harmonic. Ogun doesn't do this. it simply has all those pitches as its own harmonic.

The result? If you play all the harmonics at once in harmor by default you get a saw built out of sin waves. in Ogun you get white noise. to get a saw out of ogun you have to remove a metric fuckload of frequencies. manually. it is not designed for making wave shapes in the slightest, considering the wave position of each harmonic is controlled with 2 different seed values.

I spent about an hour durping around with Ogun using the multiple default settings (defaults for different sound types, i can't believe it) and… Honestly, I would never be able to make any of those sounds from scratch in harmor or sytrus or both. that's not to say it can't be done, simply that I don't know how. Given the number of harmonics involved I'm wondering how it would sound to resample ogun and i'm gonna do that just to see what happens, but I have a feeling harmor is gonna crunch out some sort of distorted version of it, which isn't a bad thing.

So what I'm saying is, I used to think Ogun was a more primitive harmor. It isn't. It's more like 2 different evolutionary paths, and they do two very different things. which brings me to an important piece of advice

>important advice below

Don't lock yourself into only using specific tools/plugins/DAWs. Sure, specialize in them, but don't restrict yourself FROM using other things. In fact occasionally you should force yourself to experiment with other synths and DAWs from time to time, just for that fresh perspective. After you've gone through several other plugins and learned more, your sound will have improved, and you'll be able to go through plugins you may not have understood before, and might understand it better and actually enjoy it now.

For instance as above I'm starting to finally wrap my head around how ogun works (just barely), and I normally exclusively use FL, but I recently used a tracker called deflemask to make a chiptune cover of a NIN song. and actually finished it. and it wasn't a nightmare.

j'd say a u-he diva and oberheim and SEM V for analog thickness. i wouldn't pick just one of these.