Synthesizer

:The term "synthesizer" is also used to mean frequency synthesizer, an electronic system found in communications. This article is about the musical instrument.

Overview of popular synthesis methods

Subtractive synthesizers use a simple acoustic model that assumes an instrument can be approximated by a simple signal generator (producing sawtooth waves, square waves, etc...) followed by a filter which represents the frequency-dependent losses and resonances in the instrument body . For reasons of simplicity and economy, these filters are typically low-order lowpass filters. The combination of simple modulation routings (such as pulse width modulation and oscillator sync), along with the physically unrealistic lowpass filters, is responsible for the "classic synthesizer" sound commonly associated with "analog synthesis" and often mistakenly used when referring to software synthesizers using subtractive synthesis. Although physical modelling synthesis, synthesis wherein the sound is generated according to the physics of the instrument, has superseded subtractive synthesis for accurately reproducing natural instrument timbres, the subtractive synthesis paradigm is still ubiquitous in synthesizers with most modern designs still offering low-order lowpass or bandpass filters following the oscillator stage.

Related Topics:
Sawtooth wave - Square wave - Filter - Pulse width modulation - Oscillator sync - Physical modelling synthesis

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One of the easiest synthesis systems is to record a real instrument as a digitized waveform, and then play back its recordings at different speeds to produce different tones. This is the technique used in "sampling." Most samplers designate a part of the sample for each component of the ADSR envelope, and then repeat that section while changing the volume for that segment of the envelope. This lets the sampler have a persuasively different envelope using the same note. See also: Sample-based synthesis.

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