One of the goals of a creator of electronic music is to be able to produce any sound she desires.    Often while composing or producing a song, you may find yourself wanting to reproduce one sound that you have heard before.

In contemporary music production,  you may be able to reproduce a sound made by another producer by reading interviews and simply acquiring the tools or maybe even the exact presets the artist used.   While this have may have some value in gaining understanding of what has already been done, it is not always practical, and certainly does not allow you to develop your producers ears.

To gain from imitation of existing sounds, we will strive to be able to analyze and reproduce sustained tones of complex musical sounds using two simple approaches.

For the analysis, we will attempt to break down the complex tone into simple components or ingredients.   An easy way to decompose a complex tone, its to look closely at its spectrum.

Many of our DAWs and auxiliary music tools have some way of showing the spectrum.   With the spectrum view we can see how there is energy at different frequencies of sound.   The higher the energy the higher the level at a given frequency.    In this example the frequencies are the ingredients of the complex sounds and the energy levels are the amounts of ingredients we need to use to reproduce a tone.

Once we have a better understanding of the volumes of ingredients in a sound, we can begin attempting to resynthesize them.

The two simple approaches to resynthesis we will explore this week are additive synthesis and subtractive synthesis.

Additive synthesis re-produces complex tones by combining lots of simpler tones.   We can do this by using a simple sine wave tone in a sampler and layering lots of sine waves together to produce  a similar spectrum of our analyzed sound.      This method has a great amount of control on detail, but there may easily be thousands of details in a complex tone.

Subtractive synthesis starts with a complex tone (for example a square wave, white noise or a rather harsh sounding sample.   We then use filters to carve the broad spectrum into a similar shape to the analyzed sound.

By deliberately exploring these two methods of synthesis via analysis, you will begin to further train your ear as an electronic or recorded music producer.    Exercises related to this form of ear training will be valuable to repeat often as each repetition will help further develop your skills