The history of electronic music dates back to the late 1800s and early 1900s. With the development of electronic music, synthesizers and advancements in technology, especially from 1970 onwards, have significantly influenced the direction of music. Its first golden age was in the 1980s. The synthesizer is one of the fundamental instruments for producing electronic music and electronic sounds, and perhaps the most preferred. Today, synthesizers are indispensable instruments in contemporary music, electronic music, and popular music. The biggest difference between a synthesizer and other instruments is that it does not have just one or a few tones (timbres); depending on how you program it, it can produce sounds across a very wide spectrum and frequency range. Since it does not produce an acoustic sound, the sound is generated directly by a signal generator within a circuit and can only be heard through an amplifier and speakers. As a result, four things are very important: the acoustics of the room you are listening in, the quality of the speakers, the synthesis technique you use while creating the sound, that is, the timbre (color) of the sound you create (program), and mix knowledge for correctly positioning the sound. Whether it is a digital or analog synthesizer, the 40Hz sine wave produced by two different devices is the same. One is not inherently better or worse than the other.
When we examine a synthesizer, the basic elements in the audio signal path are the oscillator, mixer, filter, and VCA (voltage-controlled amplifier). Some systems can be configured as OSC-wavefolder-VCA, OSC-mixer-LPG (low pass gate), or OSC-VCA. If your instrument is analog, the voltage or decibel level at which you output from the oscillator, the voltage at which you input to the mixer, and the levels when entering and exiting the filter will significantly affect your tone and equalization. In synthesizers, the place where sound first forms is the oscillator. Various circuits can serve as oscillators. In addition to standard subtractive or additive oscillators, a feedback VCA, filter, or delay module, or a random voltage generator, clock divider, or other sources in oscillation can also be used as oscillators and can produce high frequencies that our ears can perceive.
Synthesis techniques are a way to define the sounds we create by mixing these oscillators or modulating them with each other. There are over 20 basic synthesis techniques that have been developed over time. Additionally, there are many advanced patch techniques. Synthesis techniques can significantly change how your melody sounds. Knowing synthesis techniques helps you to reach the sound in your mind more accurately and easily. It enables you to describe and express the sounds you hear. It helps you understand which synthesis techniques and their combinations make up a genre. It allows you to position sounds more accurately within music. These techniques (if the instrument is subtractive) enable you to recreate the patch on another subtractive synthesizer (or a synthesizer that can adapt to this structure) very closely, perhaps identically. Similarly, you can program a very similar kick sound you hear on a drum machine on a monophonic synthesizer plug-in. Here, variables that are difficult to calculate, differences in envelope curves, envelope operating speeds, or VCA opening and closing speeds, curves, how the filter cuts frequencies, the resonance character, and the waveform curves of the oscillator come into play. Once you hear the small differences and color variations between all synthesizers, you want to buy all of them. In electronic music, being knowledgeable about synthesis techniques is as important as harmony in music. You can think of a synthesizer and synthesis techniques as "you are a composer, and you have a symphony orchestra in front of you." How you hear the melody you write is entirely up to you.