Sound Design

                                                            Sound Deisgn

What is a Synthesizer?

A synthesizer is a instrument that creates a wide range of sounds, it's operated by a keyboard using different signals and frequencies of sounds. They can emulate a variety of sounds such as, a helicopter, a voice and much more. Synthesizer's isn't exactly natural sounds, they're more a frequency and a electronic sound. In Synthesizers there's different waves such as Sine, Triangle, Square and the saw wave.  Back in the 70's there was only one wave which was the Sine wave, it was the mot basic sine wave ever it had no control over pitch.

ADSR envelope

The ADSR stands for:

A- Attack

D- Decay

S - Sustain 

R - Release

It's a tool used to shape sounds. What the envelope does is it controls the impact and length of the sound, It opens and closes the sound. The ADSR has different roles to them which is:
A: The attack tells us how quickly the sounds want to be hit at a high amplitude, a short attack has a instant reaction, the slow attack has a slow reaction.

D: The Decay is the time taken subsequent attack level from designated sustain level.
S: The sustain is the duration of how long it will go on when a key is released
R: The release is how long it will take for it to decay from the sustain level 0

The wave forms and plug ins
Synthesized sounds are made from these basic sign waves: sine, square, triangle and saw. Back then they wasn't able to combined 2 wave only one. This is what the waves look like:

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Between these 3 waves, the cleanest is the Sine, as there is no distortion, fuzzyness or anything. This wave sounds more polythonic than others. The triangle wave is almost the same as the sine except it there's a deeper bass in this waveform, as you can see on the diagram above^ the triangle picture almost matches the sine, it's just more sharper.
Comparing the Triangle and the saw tooth they both do not look the same but when it comes to sound they are about 60% the same. The Square sounds like it's combined with another sound, it's clean with harmonics and it has a higher pitch. The Sawtooth is the distorted sine wave, it has that fuzz-buzzy type of sound and it's low pitched compared to the other sine waves.

Nowadays we are able to combine more than 1 waveform to create a variety of different sounds by using software's such as Logic for example. We do this by using the ES2 Synthesizer we can also tweak the sound to create another sound. This is what it looks like:

This is the ES2 Synthesizer as you can see we can now manipulate synths using this. We can combine Waveforms to create new sounds, add distortion, change the key and many more. This is the main Synthesizer plug in where we can create our Synths, Synths like Pads, Leads, Basses or anything by just using this plug in. It may look complicated because of the different options there are but it's not as complicated as you think, as you can see there's different options/diagrams/areas each of these areas work as one. The most important area of them all is the one on the left and the middle. 

This is where the Sine, Triangle, Square and saw waveforms are located. This is how we can now combined more than one, where it says '1,2,3' that meas if we want to combine either 2 waves, 3 waves or just leave it at one wave. In the middle option where it says filter, we use this to tweak the waves around, we can add Resonance for high frequency fx, we can also add drive which makes the sound fuller. 

Another plug in we can also use for Synthesizer's is the EXS24 sampler. It has some features of the ES2, it's more of the easier version when using Synthesizers or tweaking Synthesized sounds. The features it has that relates to synth's is the cut off, drive, LFO, resonance, bandwidth and some other's. The features that it doesn't have is the 'Sine/Triangle/Saw/Square' option. In the middle section you can see it has 'cut off' ' the cut off is like an Envelope if you move that green line right and left contently then it would create an open and close type of sound. If you bring it all the way down to the left it would give you that warmth type of sound.

ES2 or EXS24?
Similarities: They both have the same features such as Resonance, Drive, Bandwidth, LFO option and so on. They can both tweak Synthesized presets, they can create a variety of sounds and manipulate them to create more interesting synths,
Differences: The EXS24 is more of a sampler than a Synthesizer, it doesn't have the Sine/Triangle/Square/Saw option, it doesn't have that much options to create the sounds you actually want and there's not enough presets.
The ES2 is not a sampler it's more a synthesizer, you can create any type of Synths, you can choose more than one waveform, change the key of it, add distortion and many more.
In my opinion I would choose the ES2 for making Synth sounds, this is because it's a Synth type of plug in. There's many options to choose from if you want to create different sounds such as the Envelope, cut off, LFO, pitch and many more. Although it looks complicated It's actually quite sophisticated and more intelligent than the EXS24 when it comes to Synthesizers.