2025-02-16
I finished the Syntorial course last week. It's too soon to say what it has brought me but I want to gather my retrospective thoughts before I forget them.
It's an interactive self-study course that you run as a Windows or macOS app on your own computer. It teaches you synthesizer sound design on its built-in software synthesizer using a combination of short video lessons and lots of guided practice.
Syntorial starts from the basics without assuming you already know how to use a synthesizer. I am not a beginner but most of what I already knew was self-taught, meaning there were all sorts of gaps in my knowledge. And I never did a lot of practice.
I could tell right away that Syntorial's practice through ear training was really valuable to me. It took a little longer until I started to appreciate the explanatory videos, probably because the very early ones were not telling me anything new yet. In retrospect I think both aspects are great and they work together very well.
The built-in synthesizer of Syntorial uses simple "analog" waveforms (saw wave, pulse wave, triangle wave and sine wave) but unlike most analog synthesizers the oscillators reset each time you play a new note. And you can turn off this reset behavior.
If you exclude a few modular oscillators with a sync input this is quite a rare feature among my hardware synths. Almost all of them have free-running oscillators. The romplers don't because they play back there samples from the beginning. But then they can't do free-running oscillators and also no pulsewidth modulation (PWM) unless it's baked into the sample at a fixed rate. The closest I could get for analog style sounds with the option of oscillator reset was the Waldorf MicroWave which resets by default but which can also free-run.
The distinctive property of oscillators that reset is that when you detune them you get an extra attack transient sound because the swirling phase cancellation sound of detuned oscillators is absent at the start of the note and then builds up. It's the transition of equal phase to the detuned beating sound. I rarely use this in my music because most of my synths can't do it. It's also not what I want all the time. But now thanks to Syntorial I have an ear for it.
Before Syntorial I was not used to making subtle use of transposed oscillators, e.g. having one oscillator playing a fifth higher than the root. If you have the oscillators at equal volume this sounds like a fixed dyad and that is a very distinctive sound that easily clashes with the scale you're playing in. What I appreciate more now is that if you dial back the non-root oscillator then instead of creating harmony you create more of a timbral effect.
I also never knew that up-transposed triangle waves can be nice to blend in.
I tend to always use a filter envelope to add articulation and movement to the sounds I make. Before Syntorial I underappreciated how nice sounds with little or no filter movement can sound.
I got to hear these sounds because Syntorial starts from the basics and it takes a while before they introduce the filter envelope. Before they do that you end up doing a bunch of exercises where you play and listen to sounds with static filter settings and they're not that bad!
First of all I want to express my appreciation that Syntorial spends some time on FM synthesis at all. I don't know if actual beginners thank them for it but I do.
Compared to the surrounding chapters of the course, things suddenly got a lot easier for me when Syntorial covered FM. I still feel not-good-at-FM-programming but at least this reminded me I did learn something from all the time I spent on the DX7 (and lately the DX11).
I'm not sure how FM is implemented in Syntorial but I could tell it introduces a slight pitch shift when you increase the FM amount. I don't think the Yamaha synths do this and this makes me wonder if Syntorial is not doing phase modulation but something different that just sounds like it.
I never know what to do with sub-oscillators. On most of my synths, if they have them at all they are fixed to a square wave and they add buzzy mud to whatever sound I was programming.
Syntorial taught me that triangle subs can be nice as long as you fix the volume issues they cause. (You need to crank the triangle to hear it and/or turn everything else down.) Oscillator sync sounds can have a weak fundamental for instance and blending in a triangle sub can fix that without drawing attention to itself the way a square sub would.
And certain effects (e.g. very wet chorus) can thin out the sound and then it sometimes works to blend in a square wave sub-oscillator.
I know what oscillator sync is but I rarely make sync sounds I like. Like the subs this is an example where besides the ear training, the explanatory content of Syntorial was really valuable for me.
They give you good basic guidelines (e.g. use square or saw on your carrier, use medium carrier pitch bias when doing a pitch envelope sweep, use more bias with a bipolar LFO). And I got to hear a lot of nice examples and recreate them. As I mentioned above blending in a triangle wave was also a really nice trick. Too bad few of my synths let me do that; most of them have only two oscillators and you need both just to make the sync sound.
Ring modulation is another one of those features that synth reviewers praise but I never "get". Again the explanatory content was really helpful (stick with square waves) and it was good exercise to recreate ring mod sounds. They were often easy to recognize in the challenges because they make the synth go out of tune in the higher registers.
Many synths default to saw waves but for both sync and ring mod square waves sound better. I often never bothered to switch my synths from saw to square when trying out these cross modulation techniques.
I don't like distorted synth sounds much. Syntorial lets you play with them quite a bit and the biggest takeaway for me is that it is just really hard to dial in a nice sound because of the non-linearity of distortion.
With most of the oscillator modifying effects (detune, PWM, sync, ring mod) you can sort of tell how intense they are and when you start to approximate you hear if you're getting closer or not. They behave more or less linearly in some of their parameters.
With distortion it's all over the place which part of the spectrum starts jumping out the most as you dial up the distortion and move the filter cut-off. Often I could not tell if I was getting closer and I had to just try all the knob combinations.
On top of that the timbre can jump from note to note. Distortion (the one in Syntorial at least) is not even linear with respect to the pitch of the notes you're playing.
The class of tones you can make with synth distortion are still not my cup of tea but it was cool to learn more about how to use it.
I spent an hour of my studio time each day doing Syntorial the past few months. (Doing more wasn't feasible because of how mentally exhausting it was.) Now that I'm done I can spend that hour on regular music making again.
Part of me wants to make my own Syntorial ear training for FM synthesis but I'd want to do it on a hardware synth (probably the DX11) and I haven't come up with a good way to implement the toggling between target sound and your own approximation yet. These synths have a "compare" function when you're editing but toggling that button shows the solution parameter value on the screen so I'd have to close my times every time I hit "Compare". The fact that in Syntorial you have to listen and there are no visual cues if you're getting closer is important.
I'll keep thinking about it but my computer programming laziness may get in the way of this FM ear training project ever happening. I'm more motivated to make music than to write the required computer programs.
Syntorial ends with the advice to initially apply your new skills on just 1 or 2 synths, i.e. to favor depth over breadth. This is a common piece of advice that many people find hard to adhere too. The buy-a-new-synth grass is always greener on the other side. I also struggle with this.
Having said that I agree with the advice and I've been eyeing my trusty Nord Rack 2 because its capabilities and design are reasonably similar to Syntorial. The Nord has a lot of potential, it's approachable, I like how it sounds and I can no longer claim to not know what all the buttons do.
I'm done writing excited blog posts about Syntorial for now (phew) but I may revisit it one more time in a few months once I understand how this new knowledge is helping me.
Thanks for reading!