ARTURIA – ORIGIN – USER’S MANUAL
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11
THE BASICS OF SUBTRACTIVE SYNTHESIS
Subtractive synthesis appeared at the end of the 1960’s, giving birth to the first analog synthesizers:
Moog, Sequential Circuits (the Prophet Series), ARP, EMS, Oberheim, Roland (Jupiter or SH series),
Yamaha (CS series) and Korg (MS and PS series). During the 1980’s, the purely analog subtractive
synthesis model of the first keyboards was progressively replaced by wave table oscillators (Prophet
VS) or sample based instruments.
As an owner of the Origin synthesizer, you now have access to an immense sonic generation
possibilities, where subtractive synthesis is coupled with the analog oscillators and the wave table
generators.
THE BASICS
Of all the forms of audio synthesis, subtractive is one of the oldest, and to this day, the most
frequently employed by sound designers and musicians alike. This is due to the simplicity with
which complex sounds can be created, over the more unwieldy forms of synthesis techniques, such
as additive or granular, to name but two. As a basic overview to subtractive synthesis, one may
consider any sound created either in nature or on your synthesizer of choice, as consisting of a
number of sine waves, or harmonics grouped together. In subtractive synthesis, we start with a
harmonically rich sound such as a saw wave, and through filtering, we remove the sine waves (or
harmonics) that we do not want. This as you can imagine is a great deal more complex than simply
turning a filter control knob!
11.1
The three main elements of the sound
11.1.1
The Oscillator or VCO
The oscillator or VCO (
Voltage Controlled Oscillator
) is the starting module (with the noise module
which is often classed among the oscillators) for the creation of a sound on an analog system.
The two main goals of the oscillator module are to generate the initial sound signal through a
waveform generator, and to give a basic fixed pitch to this resulted sound.
We can think of the oscillator like a violin string that once stroked or plucked, vibrates to create its
sound.
An Oscillator module on Origin
The main oscillator settings are: