Synthesis and sound design book?

For fans of synths, pianos, organs or keyboard instruments of any sort.

Re: Synthesis and sound design book?

Post by Ben Asaro »

I am curious to see if enough people commented on that to get an index added to the new one coming out. I’ll let you know!
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Re: Synthesis and sound design book?

Post by N i g e l »

I normally just CTRL-F and search for what I want ;)

For paper books the list of key words at the back with associated page numbers was probably my 1st port of call in a search but invariably it didnt have the key word I wanted. I get the same now with those interactive HELP files.

For a technical book, I would normally only use an index for the 1st or 2nd read, as an overall, top level map of the book, so that I know whats comming up on my journey through the book. For that reason on its own, I think an index is an essential part of the presentation of the information in the book.

Tools like Microsoft word can automatically create an index from your chapter and paragraph headings so what was Patch & Tweak authors problem ?
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Re: Synthesis and sound design book?

Post by Zukan »

https://www.robpapen.com/RP_Book_and_Video.html

Can't recommend Rob 's books/plugins enough. Top bloke that actually knows his shit.
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Re: Synthesis and sound design book?

Post by Flank Audio »

As a few others have said. "The Computer Music Tutorial" is a good starting place for this stuff. It's bit of a beast but there's some useful information in there. It certainly helped me out a lot during my DSP/coding moodules at university. It's also relatively easy to read when compared with some other academic books out there!!
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Re: Synthesis and sound design book?

Post by YashN »

N i g e l wrote: Sat Nov 09, 2019 12:04 pm I still need to map out my strategy on the back of an envelope before starting on VAST campagain but there are plenty of really good VAST video tutorials online...

For FM,
play with 1 oscillator/operator and get to know the sound
play with a 2 operator stack and get to know the sound

that goes along way down the road to familliarisation and it is so much easier to play around with the sound these days using knob box controllers.

It starts to get more experimental with taller operator stacks but a lot of sonic complexity comes from having parallel stacks rather than maxing out the number of operators in one stack.

Here's a tip: approach V.A.S.T. after you have a good knowledge of simple Subtractive Synthesis and find out how to implement that in V.A.S.T.

Secondly, after this, you can try various other methods of synthesis within V.A.S.T., including other historical ones (including F.M. via the original V.A.S.T. DSP processing units), present ones that didn't exist when V.A.S.T. was launched, and future ones that still don't exist commercially.

View it as a multi-Synthesis Synth-building (and Drum Machine building, and Sampler-building, and Interactive Phrase Sequencing building, and Effects building) platform, because that's what it truly is.

When you start, there are a few examples in the manual. Learn the manuals and experiment along the way.

As someone who was writing advanced tutorials back in the day, I think it's still one of the most misunderstood platforms.
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Re: Synthesis and sound design book?

Post by electroacoustics »

I recommend:
  • FARNELL, Andy: Designing Sound. MIT Pres, 2010 :thumbup:


François.

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