SOUND ON SOUND
Having laid bare the inner workings of oscillators, contour generators and filters, Gordon Reid turns his attention to something which at first sight seems entirely self-evident. Can the humble voltage-controlled amplifier really hold any Synth Secrets?
Waldorf's flagship keyboard synth has been available for months — but until very recently, it was so unfinished that it was scarecely reviewable. Since April, Gordon Reid has stuck with it, painstakingly noting the improvements that have come with each system software upgrade, until finally, with the synth standing at OS version 1.13, enough features are working to justify a full SOS review.
Gordon Reid reveals some of the limitations of the 'classic' ADSR envelope with reference to a practical synthesis example, and explains some of the different types of envelopes found on 'classic' analogue synths, from AR envelopes right up to highly flexible digitally controlled EGs.
Some cheap monosynths from the '70s and '80s are now highly regarded and hugely expensive second-hand buys. Not so the Jen SX1000 which, says Gordon Reid, is an unjustly neglected nugget of synth history.
![Figure 1: [left] An irregular, non-repeating waveform.](https://dt7v1i9vyp3mf.cloudfront.net/styles/teaser_large/s3/imagelibrary/f/fig1_2-1199-qn1kg0IBD6sDFqsMt7NCi22Lc1obEtlu.gif)
You press a key on your synth. It plays a note. That's it, right? Wrong. We explain the role of envelopes, gates, and triggers in this deceptively simple process.
As Parts 4 & 5 of Gordon Reid's series showed, even the simplest analogue filters mess with your sound in complicated ways. In this Part, he considers what happens when you make the design more sophisticated...
Designing analogue circuitry to recreate drum sounds is nothing new, but Analogue Solutions have gone one stage further with their Concussor system — it's modular, making it probably the world's first commercially available dedicated modular percussion synth. Gordon Reid can scarcely control his voltages...
Gordon Reid continues his series on the theory of subtractive synthesis by delving deeper into the amazingly complex world of the analogue audio filter.
![Figure 1 [top] and Figure 2.](https://dt7v1i9vyp3mf.cloudfront.net/styles/teaser_large/s3/imagelibrary/f/fig1fig2-0899-drTdXKN2Q.4BYJoVKqo_h0J0WDVxuNDX.gif "Figure 1 [top] and Figure 2.")
Having dealt last month with the concepts of envelopes, oscillators and LFOs, Gordon Reid moves on to the subject of filters, and the havoc they wreak on the signals that pass through them.
We move on from discussing the harmonic components of sound to explaining how they change over time, and some of the tools subtractive synths give you to emulate this process.