Panning individual partials (generally not the 1st partial) in opposite directions can make sounds really, really wide without changing the actual timbre of the sound. Detuning individual partials can also make big sounds and sound really good. If you do this right you can make really big sounds. It’s been surprisingly CPU effective with 6 partials, but the one I made with 10 partials was not, plus it was a pain in the to control effectively.įirst off, make your first instance of the EFM1- don’t make all of them quite yet!Īdditive 10.png (254.18 KiB) Viewed 4245 timesĪnother thing that can blow your mind is turning up the FM and changing the modulator wave on some of the partials (especially the 3rd). Since we are making the synthesizer by synthesizing each partial with a separate synthesizer on a separate track, we can do some things that you can’t in things like Razor or Harmor (of course, Razor and Harmor can do things that we can’t with this little home made one). We will make it with 6 instances of the EFM1. With additive synthesis you control which harmonics you hear.
A sawtooth wave has every harmonic lined up in a row, a square wave has only odd harmonics, and other waves have different assortments. Different sounds create sound with different harmonics, but the math is (almost) always the same. Additive synthesizers make use of this by placing sine waves (called “partials”) in their correct harmonic places. The Fourier Theorem states that every sound can be split up into individual sine waves.
Today I’ll show you how to make a simple additive synthesizer that can make some really crazy sounds.