where we amongst other things, are reading up on the works of synthesis and how it works.
There are sevral diffrent methods which you can use to create a sound through synthesis
a few are:
Additive synthesis
Subtractive synthesis
Sample-based
DSP
As for normal synthesizers, they are build up with diffrent components to create your sounds. I bet you've sometime seen the characters VCO or VCF in your vst-plug collection. They are examples of such components.
VCO is a short for Voltage Controlled Oscillatior, and VCF short for Voltage controlled Filter.
a few others are:
DCO: Digital Controlled Oscillator
VCA: Voltage Controlled Amplifier
EG: Envelope Generator
LFO: Low Frequency Oscillator
These are the base-components for ordinary synthesizers. Every single vst-plug or analog, digital synth use them in diffrent ways and methods.
Not everyone knows about it, but simply use the factory made presets that follows from the manufacturer, never to wonder what makes the clock tick.
My hopes are that more people will become aware of how synthesizers work, and be able to create new and exiting sounds, not just for music, sounds in general aswell.
The first thing you need to know about when embarking onto your synthesis-journey is that sooner or later you will have to use envelopes in order to get your sound behaving as you want. Here is a simple mockup of how a envelope looks like:

Attack basicly means how long it should take for your sound to come to it's peak value.
With Decay you set the time it should take for your sound to go from it's peak down to the Sustain. You set the Sustain value to make your sound either long or short, basicly, it's the value which tells how long your sound should live before it begins to fade away, which is the Release.
Back to the generation of sounds. There are sevral software synthesizers out there, that have great user-interfaces, some of them try to mimic the old analog hardware synthesizers and others try to give them a more futuristic look.
If you like the old hardware synthesizers look(moog,roland m.m ), minimoog and u-he's ACE will probably fit your taste well. Why i bring this up? Well i prefer to work with wheels where i can see exactly what i'm doing and where the diffrent components are placed. Of course it all depends on how good you know your synthesizer.
Links to the two software-synthesizers:
http://www.acesynth.com/
http://www.arturia.com/evolution/en/products/minimoogv/intro.html
Here is the interface for u-he's ACE (Any Cable Everywhere)

And here is the interface for minimoog:

As where minimoog offers a simple but "true" analog feeling. Ace will give you far superior advantages when creating sounds or instruments. The idea of connecting components with cables is not anything new (surprise surprise). People has done that since the birth of synthesizers.
However, it's a great way to make advanced and controlled sounds being created, since you actually see, and are able to activly connect the components to each other, in real-time.
As to where most modern software synthesizers just have everything in a big mess, trying to fit as many functions as possible onto the user-interface.
Since i'm in general not educated in music theory nor being able to play any instrument, except for the piano, where i'm so so so at best. I most commonly end up expermenting more than other people i know, with software synthesizers. This is a good thing, since i'm also interested in creating sound-effects and not only music. For instance, in the preset (it's for ACE) below i've made a sinus-wave which phases back and forth connected to a sub-oscillator which has a saw-pulse. Later to be mixed up to a Voltage Controlled Filter to cut of any frequencies above the low-register to make a really really deep and scary al'a cinema wet your pants sub-tone.
http://www.iamnevyn.se/Bass Destroyer.h2p
Feel free to use the preset in your creations.
Voices
Another thing, when creating more music inspired presets, you might wanna know about, is voices. There is not much to it, however it can give you that extra to your preset just to make a diffrence. What voices is, is how many times your sound should be played, simultaneously
with the orginal sound. Using this, you can make your sound abit more juicy and deep in the sound-image. Think of a choir, where orginally one man stands alone singing a capella, to later be joined by others who sing the same melody. Yes that's right, more people equals more voices.
That's basicly what it is. You can choose to bounce completed melodies from your software-synth and then just create a new track and the duplicate it the amount of times you want aswell, this is a little bit more CPU-friendly and also may help you with buffer-underuns.
Finally
Most of the components, when you see the full-text, are pretty much self-explanatory.
VCO, which was Voltage Controlled Oscillator, creates your tone(sinus,saw,square m.m) in a repetitive manner for you to later add diffrent components to it, if you so wish. There is no simple way in either learning this or teaching how you create a certain sound, there is but one word that will accomplish that. And that is practice. I'm still no hollywood-effects guru, but i'd like to think that i'm getting a hang on how things work, and how i do to accomplish my synthesis goals.
Sources: Mikael Åsman, Joakim Forslund


