How Additive Synthesis Works

This is the “natural flavors” version of music

"The elon musk of guitar center".. could you see that? Guitars that explode, keyboards that fly off the stand and into walls, floor staff doing hitler salutes… that'd suck pretty bad.

GOSPEL

All of us are evil and deserve to go to hell
If you have lied once, stolen a small thing, taken the lords name in vain(OMG), looked at someone sexually, you are worthy of going to hell! Here is the good news Jesus Christ paid the fine by dying on the cross so that all we have to do to get to heaven is confess plus turn away from our sins and to put all of our trust in Jesus Christ alone for your salvation!

How did you approach creating the Cello sound ? is it taking a real sample then throwing into the analyzer and then try immitate the frequency series ? i am only using Logic pro and i am not aware of tools that could give me the result you achieve with audition

They said the same thing about digital synths in the 80’s, yet here we are in 2025, still paying $5k for analog synths

"Or is it" I fully expected the V Sauce theme to kick in

Me thinks you should use max msp. You are that type. 😂

It's another option

I work in Linux, and recently I've gotten obsessed with experimenting with the additive synth "Organic", which is an eight channel additive synth in LMMS. I feel like, like everything else, this is taking me down a road.

The Kawai K5000 was a hardware synth released in 1996. It could do a lot of similar stuff to what is demonstrated here. I have a Cello patch similar in terms of realism, will get around to sharing my patch soon to other K5000 owners.

Additive, Subtractive and FM Synthesis… what about Ring Modulation?

super keen but cant find that follow up additive synthesis video on your channel….

that cello transforming between the realistic sound into the various synths and back again was sooo cool!

I love jamiroquai! nice! my third album i ever bought was the album with virtual insanity on it…. i believe it is called Supersonic?

been a fan every since and love all their other stuff

hopefully you'll see this, was that final sound achieved in either Alchemy, Csound, or Kyma? they are the only two systems I could understand such a sound being made in… harmor and morphine dont seem like they could do such a smooth "randomisation" of the partials.

Even though synthesizing could require less space in disk since it only require parameters for the sound, the process of synthesizing is heavy for processors, that is why some digital/computer synthesizers usually create a temporary library with all the notes/pitches. Like a pre synthesis of the sound, so it reduce amount required process for rendering and live play.

Nice vídeo, thanks for sharing!

Bro i just bought a cello wtf are you doing

11:40 great track

My thoughts are – additive synthesis is definitely a useful tool, but it is never going to make samples obsolete. Just IMO! You need a ridiculous amount of processing power to handle enough partials (and allow good enough polyphony!) to completely fool us. To emulate a static sound is not that difficult and I mean you can do it in Alchemy (700 partials max). But the big kicker is emulating the actual physics and behavior of a particular instrument (which is easier done with physical modeling than additive synthesis), THAT would take an awful lot of time to get right for each instrument. It took Pianoteq 10 years to get to an acceptable level of quality (and that's not an additive synth – so for additive synth it would be even more difficult/time intensive!). And what about the recording chain? The mic, the room? Samples still portray this most faithfully, and you cannot reproduce this with 1000 partials. Maybe 10000 would suffice.

And ultimately: sampling is SIMPLE to use. Additive synthesis is anything but. Yeah you can get to places with machine learning, but that is still not really layman people territory (programming such algorithms), while anyone can grab a mic and a recorder and… do stuff with it.

I say all this as a supporter of physical modeling (I absolutely adore Pianoteq), but also with deep knowledge about sampling (since I've been developing Kontakt libraries for the past 13 years).

Fascinating video, definitely subbed, and at this point in time, I'm seeking it video content like these to really become better at sound design, and understanding how to make anything from basically nothing 🤔👀 thanks for this video tho, learned a lot

Could you have a synth with all these capabilities? Do they make one that isn’t a giant modular?

When you mention that additive synthesis can be used where disk or memory resources are limited (like games on microprocessors etc.), it sounds like you are reinventing lossy compression (like MPEG/Audio).