Missing: in polyphonic instruments, notes affect other notes. For instance, on a piano, a staccato C2 by itself is a totally different beast from a staccato C2 played while the dampers are off other keys, from a haunting reverb from notes in a higher register to deep overtones from notes in a lower register.

Most simulated pianos these days add the extra harmonics when the sustain pedal is pressed, but very few seem to get the harmonics from the dampers being lifted per-key; PianoTeq gets this right.

Making synthesizers emulate the sound of real instruments was once a major goal of synthesis, but that has mostly faded outside of the rarefied world of physical modeling. Electronic musicians remain interested in sounding "warm" and "organic" (or the opposite), but it's rare to find someone who is really interested in making a synthesizer sound exactly like a guitar or a clarinet.

But when I was learning FM synthesis (one of the harder ones), I found it incredibly useful to go through the exercise of trying to make a synthesizer sound like a convincing gong, or reed instrument, or guitar string. In fact, I don't think FM really clicked until I did that.

Hard disagree with #18. If you don't pull your bass register into mono (or really close to it) it's going to sound like ass in small spaces, like a car, or big spaces, like a club or big stage.

I struggled for quite a while with getting bass to sound right on different systems and pushing the bass into mono helped a ton.

Also consider the length of the waves. If you're playing on a system in a club that has the subs 50 feet apart, you're going to get weird nodes from comb filtering and the bass will just disappear in certain places in the room.

I'm not aware of stereo bass having anything to do with vinyl, the issue is overall bass volume.

Most of the other ideas are pretty good and can be summed up as follows:

Humanize/randomize pitch, velocity, and rhythm

Use distortion to add extra harmonics

Don't use a flute patch 2 octaves below C or a contrabass patch 4 octaves above C, respect the "true" frequency range of the patch

Use appropriate panning

Use reverb

(Actually I disagree with the idea of using many different reverbs. Your ears will pick up on it and it will sound unnatural. IF you do this, turn up the reverb until you can hear it, and then dial it all the way back until it seems to disappear.)

Rex Basterfield makes tons of free synthesised VST instruments, but created an interesting 'resonating sound box' effect earlier this year that would seem relevant here for the box tone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NBm0CdJ8x0

Got to recommend his Sim-Cimbalom instrument too... he created and released this amazing synth 12 days after I suggested it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALKOXqQXyTs

Many of his instruments provide little details along the lines of those in the article (see his narrated YouTube vids), all freely-available here, most-recent at the bottom:

http://flowstoners.com/quilcom

This is a pretty solid list, props to OP for putting his observations all in one place!

I definitely agree with 2,3 that clippy hard transients are cool (clipping is in general a bit underrated as a creative synthesis tool).

From my general experience playing and designing with the 'classical' synth approaches (additive, subtractive, FM/PM) nice results are the cumulative result of many tiny hacks of the kind listed, well-judged micro-aberrations.

The spice makes the dish, that is.

This makes design and testing patches a somewhat infinite, fiddly task. Or endless fun, depending on your point of view.

Obviously, if you want to productise your thing - ie you'd like other people to use it - this you now have a control problem: bake in dozens of parameters such that 'it just works' or make them all available and let the user figure it out themselves.

I find this article to be shallow and dismissive: even twenty years ago waveguides worked very well at modeling many acoustic instruments. If readers would like an introduction to waveguides this is one of the foundational papers: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234809707_Theory_of...

This is really interesting to me but there’s a few things here that are beyond my reach. Could anyone describe these in more detail or point to references?

* partials? Is that another word for harmonics?

* “Box tone”?

* Breakpoint synthesis? ChatGPT suggests this is a kind of interpolation but I don’t quite get it.

Any general references would be really appreciated. Thank you!

This is a topic close to my heart. In 2019 in the peak of lockdowns - i decided to indulge a backburner curiousity i've had for a decade and a bit - modular synthesis. I bought the recommended modules for Doepfer's rendition of a Trautonium (a ribbon input instrument) - which needs to be heard to be appreciated. One thing which this instrument showed me is how little pitch variation is utilised in synthesis. In this thread on modwiggler (modular synth forum) there's a very indepth convo about realistic bowing/string sounds.

I tried recording a rendition of Hans Zimmer's memoirs of a geisha main theme violin solo (scroll down to the youtube clip of the geisha).

The pitch being fully continuous and in control of the player injects incredible amounts of "realism" and "violin-ness" to the sound. The IR of violin body i added in this example is crude - BUT - it illustrates my point really nicely: https://modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=68150&start=100

I think both the attack pitch envelope is crucial to get this right as well as the pitch bends induced by the player.

An even better illustration is in an even cruder synth i own - Unisyn's Pitch to CV converter has a VERY crude tri/square/saw wave - and the the pitch + volume - is the main carrier of expression - this is an example of me playing a bamboo flute into a mic - and having it converted to a saw wave synth patch through some reverb added in post - the flutiness is remarkable here imo:

https://soundcloud.com/khaleeji/unisyn-flute-and-vocal-recor...

I have to shout out Fricko modules - in Euro being really cool forward thinking modules which aim to inject some novel building blocks for building acoustic sounds: https://fricko.home.blog/

I recently observed an interesting technique being used to radically alter the perception of synthesized sounds, by using the Pianoteq piano simulator, turning off all of the string and core piano sounds, and leaving only the level and key noise samples playing, then layering this on top of a synth sound - it had the amazing effect of making the synthesizer patch sound very realistic, as it added key noises and environmental (striker) noises to the background .. it was quite astonishing how this radically effected the perception.

I recently bought Reason only so I could play with their new physical modelling synth "Objekt" (https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack-extension/objekt/). It's the best of its kind that I have ever played with. It really feels like an uncategorized acoustic instrument. Highly recommended if you're into things like that!

I found this very interesting. I’ve done video synthesis and it creates quite nice results if you add a lot of similar analogue inspired tunings to very digital and simple oscillators. Slight randomness to everything, noise floor, over cranked signal that distorts and blooms, color channels mismatching, uneveness across screen, dirty color values of white and black, ringing, trailing etc.

Especially if everything is tuned so subtle that it’s just barely noticable.

About a decade ago, within my circle of amateur musicians, it was considered nearly impossible to achieve an ‘acoustic’ sound using a completely digital loop. The simplest method found to enhance the quality of a synthetic sound was to play it through a speaker and then capture it using a microphone.

Finite difference methods are phd level difficult but that’s how you get the best results currently. Check out physicalaudio.co.uk

In the end it may be easier to reprocess the synth version with AI trained on acoustic sounds, ideally with options to select different performers' styles. The long list of algorithmic tips there may indeed work, but could be expensive to code, test, debug, and tune.

Anyone interested in discussing these topics, I'd like to discuss more, since it's what I'm working on. My email is my profile. I'm also participating in discussion on the thread.

I'm working on an additive synthesizer right now and it's so fun to make plucks where the partials have different envelopes

I always wondered about doing this with hardware. Surely there must be some other mechanism for accurately creating sounds then a flat magnetic speaker.