Are your synthesiser patches coming across as flat and humdrum? Or are you a recording musician looking to add ear-catching synths to your tracks without spending months mastering the art of sound design? Here are half a dozen programming ideas to get you up, running and inspired.

Don’t Be Ashamed To Start With A Preset

In the early days of synthesis, when memory was decidedly limited, factory presets came in very small numbers and were essentially a marketing tool intended to show off the capabilities of an instrument, as well as providing a limited set of starting points for a handful of archetypal sounds. Today, though, every soft synth includes a vast repository of spectacular prefab patches, often programmed by name artists and sound designers, and requiring minimal – if any – input to work into a track. So does that mean we should just sidestep the ‘Init’ patch entirely and head straight for the preset library every time? Yes, absolutely, if that works for you. Not every music producer is an expert synthesist, and for those who aren’t, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with pulling up a preset, perhaps tweaking the filter envelope and effects, and calling it a day – if it sounds great, it is great. And even for the more skilled programmer, it’s likely that there’s a preset in any given synth that will get you much of the way towards the sound you’re hearing in your head, so why not save time and start with that rather than a blank canvas?

Design The Sound With The Part Playing

While it’s perfectly standard procedure to program a new synth part at the keyboard, playing and editing at the same time, it can be preferable to get the MIDI notes ‘on the page’ first, thereby freeing your hands and mind up to focus entirely on the control panel of your instrument. Even if it’s just a sketch of what will eventually be the final part, having a representative sequence looping in place while you program helps to keep your manoeuvres on-mission, technically and stylistically. When you want to hear the specific effect of velocity modulation on a certain parameter, say, stop playback and reach for the ivories; and don’t hesitate to make changes to the MIDI clip as the patch develops, should the need arise. Don’t just audition the part in solo the whole time, either: although it’s likely you’re nowhere near a final arrangement (let alone mix) at this stage, it makes sense to design your patch primarily in situ.

Automate Your Synth

As powerful as the modulation systems in the current generation of supercharged soft synths are – most notable the freeform multi-stage envelopes offered by the likes of Serum, Massive X, Hive and many others – they don’t hook into every control in the GUI. When a particular parameter can’t be enlivened via modulation, or your available mod sources don’t give you the type of movement you need, automate the target control in the host DAW instead. Not only does this open up those otherwise unreachable knobs and sliders to real-time animation, but it also lets you capitalise on the versatile automation features that your DAW developers have put so much time and money into developing. Automation envelopes can be drawn or recorded live through the full length of a synth part, or copied as part of a MIDI clip for looping riffs.

Don’t Forget Noise

The noise oscillator in your synth is all but essential for fabricating electronic drums and cymbals, but it’s also incredibly useful in more general terms, giving you the means by which to add sizzle and fizz to any sound. Whenever you find a patch lacking in bite or presence, dialling in a bit of noise might well be answer. Experiment with the various colours of noise available to your specific synth; shape the attack, decay and sustain of the oscillator using an envelope, as befits the component of the sound you’re looking to ‘noisify’ (quick decay for a bass, high sustain for a pad, etc); and set the volume so that the noise beds in under the main oscillators, rather than sitting on top of the sound – unless you want it to be the centre of attention, of course!

Rinse Those Onboard Effects

A key feature of many high-end synths is their built-in effects, with apex instruments such as Omnisphere and Pigments boasting freely configurable racks of signal processors to rival their standalone plugin equivalents in functionality if not sound. Indeed, as a tour of those synths’ preset libraries reveals, these modules are every bit as essential in defining their individual characters as the quality of the oscillators and filters. So, rather than thinking of them as the final stage in the sound design process, bring them into play right from the off when cooking up new patches, and treat them as an integral part of your programming workflow.

That’s not to say, however, that your external effects plugins are simply rendered superfluous by their bespoke synth-bound rivals. It’s unlikely, for example, that the onboard compressor, EQ or reverb in your synth sounds as good as dedicated plugins from FabFilter, Universal Audio, LiquidSonics et al. And while substituting the filter in a synth for a separate plugin such as The Drop or WOW is tricky to do, if those alternatives get you the sound you want, it could be worth the effort.

Stack Up Multiple Synths

With no upper limit on the number of synthesisers you can have in a project bar the speed of your computer’s CPU, and most DAWs enabling multiple virtual instruments to be triggered from a shared MIDI track, why restrict yourself to a single synth per sound? If a particular part demands a level of sonic complexity and/or depth that one instrument alone can’t deliver, rack up as many of them as it takes to achieve your goal, mixing up synthesis types without prejudice to build the mad hybrid of your dreams – FM and analogue for a fat, punchy bass; analogue, wavetable and additive for an elaborate, scintillating pad, etc. Approach all the synths on your hard drive as potential components in a huge ‘modular’ system and all sorts of wild possibilities emerge.

Do you have any thought-provoking synthesis techniques to pass on? Tell us all in the comments.