Author: Avareth Taika

  Bit of background: I’ve been involved in pro audio since I was a child. My father worked as an audio engineer in Cambridge and when I got into making and recording music on guitar, he taught me a lot, and I’ve experimented and come up with my own thing, and have a personal recording,…

  The 4 basic waveforms – saw, square, triangle, and sine – have been the cornerstones of musical and other sound design for decades, be they as audio oscillators, modulators in the form of LFOs or phase modulating audio rate oscillators, or even just the effects of beating waveforms from detuning. But, the humble saw…

  While I don’t typically work with corporations, I was recently contracted by a company to create an audio style guide – that is, the sounds heard in their advertisements, interfaces, social media, and website. This basically revolves around creating their audio brand, sounds that encompass the brand’s audio logo, product sounds, and other sounds…

  Modern music production tends to have extremely wide sounds in it. Rock employs multiple guitar takes and panning to give you a wall of searing leads and heavy chords. Rap does a similar techniques but with vocals. Many electronic genres use stereo synthesizers and post processing to create wide sounds. This article will review…

  Modern producers love the idea of analog without analog. They want the tone of analog, but the perfect replication, zero physical size, and ease of multiple instances of digital. While personally I use actual analog to get the analog sound, from analog sound sources to my analog console, run through analog rack gear and…

  Let’s learn the parts of a synthesizer! Whether you have Serum, a Juno, Massive, an MS20, FM8, a Minimoog, Helm, an Easel, Phase Plant, or really any synth, it’s good to know what you’re dealing with. Most synths, you’ll find, have the same parts: Oscillators Oscillators can be as basic as having the 4…

  Synthesis is a vast and varied topic. I’ll explain what techniques exist and how they function in this article. Subtractive is the most common, and described in detail in my “What’s a synthesizer” post. It involves taking a sound, generally from an oscillator, and subtracting parts of that sound, generally via filtering. Additive is…

  A synthesizer is an electronic device which creates sounds. Typically, it uses oscillators to create basic sounds, filters to remove parts of the frequency spectrum the oscillator sounds reside in, amplifiers to alter volume, and modulators like envelopes to change parameters over time. OK, I admit that was a barebones answer, and probably full…

  Lowpassed saw waves make up a large majority of popular synthesizer sounds. Saw waves are rich and full-sounding, lowpass filters sound nice when processing a saw wave, especially with modulation, so it makes sense we hear this so often: Old-school dubstep wobble basses were little more than two slightly detuned saw waves through a…