![]() ![]() It occurred to me that what I needed was in-depth ear training involving synth-based sound design. Despite the fact that I intellectually understood what most of the controls did, I still felt like I was at the mercy of whatever synth was in front of me. I was either spending a lot of time browsing through presets, or a lot of time tweaking knobs in a trial-and-error fashion. "I've been a gigging keyboardist and a producer for many years and as I honed the many skills involved in these activites, when it came time to use a synth. ![]() He was inspired to make Syntorial based on his struggles of learning musical synthesis: Syntorial uses controls and features that are the most common in many synthesizers, including subtractive synthesis, three oscillators, saw, pulse, triangle and sine waves, an FM parameter, noise oscillator, oscillator sync, band-pass filter with resonance and key tracking, ADSR envelopes, an AD modulation envelope, LFO, monophonic and polyphonic voice modes, portamento, unison with voice, detune and spread controls, ring modulation, distortion, chorus, phaser, delay, reverb, mod wheel, pitch wheel and velocity.Ī 2003 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, Joe Hanley had been a professional musician for 17 years, a teacher for nine years, and a composer for six years before he began work on Syntorial. Once the user finishes all the lessons, he/she will have programmed 706 patches. A total of 39 quizzes are included in-between lessons. As the user progresses, more controls are added in each topic. Once the user corrects the mistakes, they can try the challenge again or move on to the next lesson. After the user is done programming the sound, they will submit the patch to the program, with the user shown what controls they used correctly and what controls they used incorrectly. Each lesson starts with a video lecture teaching a control or a group of controls, followed by a challenge a patch is heard, but the user is not shown how the patch is programmed, so that they can try to program the patch to sound like the hidden patch. Syntorial includes a total of 199 lessons and 129 interactive challenges, where the user programs sounds using a built-in synth called Primer. The latest version of Syntorial is 1.6.1, which was released on August 4, 2015. Syntorial garnered critical acclaim with reviewers praising it a fun way to learn synthesis, earning an Editors’ Choice Award from Electronic Musician in 2014. The synth that is built into the software is called Primer, which was released as a VST and AU in November 2013. Kickstarter-funded in 2012, the program was officially released for Microsoft Windows and OS X on August 27, 2013, and for the iPad on June 25, 2015. He was inspired to make the program by his frustration of learning synthesis in his early career, and wanted to create something that would train the user to design a patch by ear. But that's just to say that it's a very effective training tool, and I'm impatient.Syntorial is a synthesizer- teaching software created by Audible Genius, a company owned by website programmer, musician and teacher Joe Hanley. My only complaint is that the lessons can be a little too challenging, to the point that you get the concept and can dial in a few, but it would be nice if there was an 'easy mode' so you can get through it and then maybe come back later and do it again to go deeper. It's the difference between hearing a sound (with your ears or in your head) and KNOWING you can sit down and program it, and hearing those same sounds and fumbling around for an hour and maybe getting lucky or maybe never really hitting the mark and not knowing why.Īnd it's not just an intellectual exercise, you are literally training your ear to recognize all the little changes and modulations that the controls on a synth do, so it becomes almost 2nd nature to reach for the thing you want, whether it's the oscillator selector to switch from a saw to a triangle to a square, the filter env, the keytracking, whatever.
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