Synthesis

A creative interface teaches you the plugin, not synthesis#

Many people who decide to stop flicking through presets put the effort into learning the synth plugin they already use. The problem is that many of those plugins have creative, interesting interfaces that abstract away the underlying synthesis concepts. You learn where that one developer put the knobs, which teaches you little that transfers and can lock you into that plugin.

A producer who understands synthesis can take the sound in his head and make it happen on his gear, without relying on presets.

A blank slate shows whether you know what you are doing#

Probably the best way to learn synthesis, and by extension a good deal of audio engineering, is a modular system. If you walk into a big modular shop, you will often hear everyone making the same kind of noise, and think you would do better. Then you sit down at the wall of modules, spend fifteen minutes failing to get any sound out of it, and half an hour later you are making exactly the same noise as everyone else.

That is not a limit of the modules. With no presets and nothing done for you, you are presented, maybe for the first time, with the cold hard reality that you need to know what you are doing. VCOs, VCFs, VCAs, function generators and sequencers patched together by hand are how you actually learn what is going on.

Software modular#

You do not need thousands of euros of Eurorack to learn this. VCV Rack is a free virtual Eurorack platform for creating sounds, not just processing them, and it maps conceptually one-to-one onto the hardware. The modular tools in Bitwig and environments like Max/MSP translate in a very meaningful way too. Physically patching real modules is still the best way to learn, but pretty much everything you learn in software carries straight over. My course, Synthesis Unlocked, is written for complete beginners as well as for people who already own a system.

Hardware is about the workflow, not the sound#

Asking whether Eurorack "sounds better" than software is, I think, maybe a slightly weird question, because it compares only one aspect. It still has to sound good, because if it sounded like crap it wouldn't be worth using. But sound is a small part of what hardware offers. The value is hands-on: plugging cables in and pulling them out, being led a bit by the instrument while still leading it to where you want to go. Clicking through endless lists of presets at a computer is a completely different experience, unrelated to the workflow I enjoy with hardware.

Part of the appeal is that a patch is temporary. Once it is recorded, you pull the cables out and it is gone.

A sequencer should feel like an instrument#

A hardware MIDI sequencer can be worth having even without hardware synths, because it drives plugins and samplers hands-on, away from the screen. It makes things quick and fun that are laborious in a DAW. The aim is to feel like you are playing an instrument, not staring at a computer, so to me a big-screen box that recreates a DAW defeats the purpose.

Depth and immediacy pull against each other. A very simple sequencer can be more inspiring than a deep one because you can just jam, and gear that is complex and unintuitive, where it takes ages to set anything up, is not fun. But something too simple eventually limits you. A capable sequencer with plenty of outputs, at least 24 or so, can also generate envelopes, LFOs and random voltages centrally, which is cheaper than racks of single-purpose modulation modules and frees space for more interesting sound sources.

The first module#

If you do build a system, my personal recommendation for the first module is Make Noise Maths. I use it in almost every lesson of my course. For anyone who wants to try patching without a full system, desktop semi-modulars like the 0-Coast and Strega are a good way in. Make Noise sent me modules for one of my videos, but I'm not just hyping them because of that: I have been a fan for over a decade.