The ultimate guide to digital synthesis

Don’t know your frequency modulation from your elbow? Look no further…

Like all of history’s great rivalries, the long-fought battle between analogue and digital ebbs and flows. Early digital synths were seen as convenient, affordable and more powerful than analogue rivals, but their ubiquity and supposed ‘cold’ sound drove many musicians back into the warm embrace of old-fashioned circuitry. Following the affordable analogue boom of the 2010s, recent years have seen a resurgence of digital synths once again, with the likes of Korg, Modal, Waldorf and Arturia releasing sure-fire future classics that are proudly digital-by-design.

What do we mean when we say ‘digital synthesiser’? On the whole, most modern synths include at least some elements of digital technology and, obviously, the plugin market is digital from top to bottom. What we’re talking about here, however, are instruments that use synthesis

techniques that can only exist in the digital realm. A plugin emulation of a Minimoog such as Arturia’s Mini V, say, is technically a digital instrument, but as its approach to synthesis is based on replicating the workflow of a subtractive synthesiser built around analogue circuitry, we’d call it a virtual analogue instrument.

What we’re focussing on this issue are instrument types such as FM, additive and wavetable synths – methods of creating sound that for reasons such as stability, complexity or memory, couldn’t feasibly be replicated by a fully analogue instrument. While there are plenty of analogue purists out there who will tell you that all digital synths are just poor approximations of their analogue counterparts, in reality – as we’ll see – nothing could be further from the truth. From the glitchy samplemangling of granular synthesis to the complex timbres of FM, there are plenty of reasons to embrace the power of DSP-driven synthesis.