Author: Avareth Taika

  AKA Ava’s guide to rectifiers (and other such nonsense available on MI Kinks), this article will go through how a simple utility module can be extremely powerful to a modular synthesist. It can also be DIY’d very cheaply, and exists for free in VCV Rack. The top section has a bipolar inverter, half wave…

  Gonna switch gears a bit here and talk about a desktop synth rather than MI modules 🙂 I do actually use a fair few desktop synths, but Korg’s OpSix has proven itself over and over for being the do everything synth i’ve wanted, and has even drawn me away from my modular for sound…

  Despite using synthesizers, I tend to make realistic sounds. That was one of the original uses of synths, to recreate sounds of other instruments, with varying degrees of success. Very few synthesizers set out to be, or are capable of being, used to synthesize sounds of nature, like birds, frogs, or… wind. The simplest…

  …Yes, yes, I realise I’ve written a lot about various MI modules and their use in synthetic sound design. I’ll probably write more too. Emilie Gillet has created some of the most useful and groundbreaking synthesizer modules to date, and I feel they deserve long-winded articles on my site at the very least! Anyway,…

  We all kind of understand wavetables, I think. We tend to use them in place of normal oscillators within a subtractive synth, and like normal oscillators, we know they can produce different waveshapes for different base sounds which we then alter with filters and effects. We can choose the shapes we use, so instead…

  Convolution has been around for a while, mostly relegated to reverbs and guitar cabinets. They use samples, called impulse responses, which are recordings of the sound a space makes after a noise burst or sine sweep has been played into it, and apply complex maths that I don’t fully understand to combine input audio…

  The following is an op-ed by a guest writer, friend and musician Mooglespy AKA Mother Dessicant. This was originally posted on a private discord server, but I felt it was worth posting here with their permission. It’s an interesting introspective on gender and synthesis which I feel can be applied to a vast array…

  This article will touch on both the differences between different types of sound design as well as basic logistics and financial requirements for each, and why synthesizers are a great addition or introduction to sound design. Kind of an all-encompassing article I suppose, though with a lean towards synthesis as that’s my preference: I…

  Compressors are things that many sound designers don’t understand because they don’t often obviously alter the tone of incoming audio. A filter makes an obvious change, as does a ring modulator or reverb. Compressors can be much more subtle in their sonic changes, but are important nonetheless. This article will walk through how compressors…

  In no particular order, here are 50 fun things you can try with your modular to make new noises: Ringmod two waves from the same oscillator together to make a new wave. Cross FM with one-way sync is sublime. Literally anything can be an exciter for a modal network. Logic works great for waveshaping.…