Synth Education

Interactive pages for learning synthesis concepts — because it's easy to forget the details, and having something you can play with helps it stick. If they help you too, great.

Synth Secrets (Parts 1–63)

Interactive companions to Gordon Reid's legendary Synth Secrets series from Sound On Sound (1999–2004). These cover the "East Coast" tradition of subtractive synthesis that shaped decades of electronic music.

Fundamentals

Keyboard & Control

Instruments

Percussion

Keyboards

Strings

Woodwinds

Organs

Effects & Finale

West Coast & Beyond (Parts 64–75)

Original lessons inspired by the same hands-on format, covering topics Reid didn't get to: wavefolding, lowpass gates, function generators, and generative patches. Same approach — just newer instruments to play with.

West Coast Synthesis

Modern Digital (Parts 76–79)

Wavetable and granular synthesis — memory-based techniques that decouple timbre from pitch and time from speed. The bridge from analog concepts to the digital tools that dominate modern sound design.

Modern Digital

Foundations & Composition (Parts 0.x–80)

Prerequisites the curriculum assumes but never teaches, plus the tools needed to actually compose: step sequencing and drum machines.

Foundations

Composition

Noise, Effects & Beyond (Parts 81–99)

Noise as a synthesis source, a guitarist's pedalboard of effects, generative sequencing, and spectral processing.

Noise & Effects

Physical Modeling

Generative

Routing & Architecture

Sound Design Recipes

Spectral

Workshops

Effects Deep Dive

Speakers & Microphones

Recommended Resources

These are resources I've found invaluable for learning synthesis:

Tools

Interactive instruments for making sounds — build patches, play notes, explore.

Experiments

Visual and audio experiments — prototypes for future features.