J. Anthony Allen breaks down synthesizer sound design into three parts: timbre (the color of a sound, like a flute versus a bagpipe), shape (how a note attacks and fades), and motion (wobble, pulse, or filter sweeps while a note plays). Each has its own tools depending on your synthesis method.
Okay, so let's talk about some sound design basics. Okay? So when we're working with a synthesizer and we're trying to create a sound that we like, there are really kind of three ways that we can craft a sound. Now, there's a lot more than three, but I'm thinking big categories here. Okay? Like, within each of these categories, there's a lot of things we can do. But the three main things we can do to a sound is we can adjust the timbre. Hold on to that for a minute. The shape and the motion of the sound. Okay, so let's go through those three. First, the timbre. The timbre is a word that we've been using in music for centuries. It literally means color. And when we talk about timbre, we're talking about the color of the sound. So here's a good way to think about what timbre is. Imagine a flute playing a note. Just imagine that in your head. A flute. Cool. Now imagine a bagpipe playing that exact same pitch. Okay? Those two sounds are very different, Right? They're playing the exact same note, but they're very different in quality. Right? The flute is going to be maybe smoother, silkier, but the bagpipe is going to be brighter, more abrasive, maybe buzzier. These are all words that are describing the timbre of the sound. Okay? Things sound different regardless of what note they're playing. You can have a whole orchestra play middle C, right? And it's going to be a conglomeration of a lot of different sounds, and that's because of the timbre of each instrument. So when we're talking about the timbre of a synthesizer, we're talking about coloring the sound, making it brighter, darker, buzzier. We use all these words like that. So that's the timbre. Second thing is the shape. The shape has to do with how it. How the note begins and how it ends and what it's doing while it's sustaining. Okay, so you might have something like. Well, let's look at the sound that we have pulled up here. Let me just make one longish note. Okay, Here's a note. Let's just hear that note. Okay, so this note has a pretty boxy shape. It starts pretty much right on. Like, when the. When the MIDI note says play, it goes boom and it's on. Right? And while it's sustaining, it's pretty flat. It's just on and going. When we get to the end of the note, it stops. Cool. Nothing fancy. Now, what if I go into the synthesizer and don't worry about what I'm doing here. We're going to go over the details of this very soon. But what if I go in here and did something like this and this and this? Okay, now let's go back to that same note. I just changed the shape of it. Okay, so let's hear that note now. Okay, what did we hear? When the note started, it ramped up, and then it came back down really suddenly. And then it stayed at a pretty low level for most of it. And then when we got to the end of the note, it didn't just stop. It very slowly faded out over a long time. This would be more of a sound we would use for, like, a pad. So that's the shape. Oops, I started it again. So that's the shape of the sound. And the third thing is the motion in the sound. This particular sound, while it's sustaining, is just flat. Not much motion in there. But what if it went. What if it had some wobble to it, right? Or like a pulse in it, or it went up and down in pitch and was moving around, or there was, like, a filter opening? There can be a lot of motion inside of a sound. That's the third thing. So those are the three things that we're really focusing on when we're doing sound design. And each of those things have their own tool to achieve, depending on what type of synthesis we're doing. Right. So let's talk next about the different types of synthesis.
