J. Anthony Allen breaks down synthesis into three universal building blocks: oscillators, filters, and envelopes. These components appear in every synthesizer, whether you're using Ableton Live, another DAW, or hardware. Learn to spot them anywhere and start making your own sounds.
Okay, in this chunk of the class, we're going to get into synthesis and sound design, which is kind of the same thing in many ways, not in all ways, but synthesis is kind of our first level of sound design. This is creating sounds that are our own. And we do that with synthesizers, which is to say filters, envelopes and oscillators. More on that in a second. What we're going to do in this section is it's going to be pretty Ableton focused. If you're working on something that's not Ableton, don't worry, it'll be okay. Any concept I do in this section, you can do in any software. Pretty much. I might. I'm going to show you. Like in this Ableton instrument, here is the oscillator. But the key thing for you to take away is that in any synthesizer you're looking at, whether it's an analog synthesizer or a synthesizer in Logic or FL or anything, what you need to do is find the oscillator. It'll look pretty much the same as the one I'm showing you. So find the oscillator, find the filters, find the amplifier. Those are the key building blocks that all synthesizers will have. So I'm going to do this in Ableton. But just remember, you can do it in pretty much any synthesizer by just looking for the same elements in your synthesizer, though they will always be there.
