Learn synthesis with your ears, not just your eyes.
An interactive course where every concept is a real instrument you can touch. Turn the knobs, watch the waves, and hear exactly why synths sound the way they do. Free, no signup, no downloads.
Foundations of Sound
What sound actually is, why instruments sound different, and how to read the two displays every synthesist relies on.
Subtractive Synthesis
The backbone of every synth ever made: rich oscillators, sculpting filters, and envelopes that bring notes to life.
Other Ways to Make Sound
Subtractive is one recipe among many. Meet the methods behind bells, evolving modern basses, ambient clouds and virtual strings.
Sound Design Recipes
Everything you learned, applied: build the basses, pads, leads and drums that actual tracks are made of.
What is sound synthesis?
Sound synthesis is the craft of building sounds from scratch: start with a raw electrical waveform, sculpt its brightness with a filter, shape each note in time with an ADSR envelope, and add movement with an LFO. Every synthesizer ever made, from a 1970s Moog to the software in your DAW, is a variation on that chain. This course teaches it the only way that sticks: by ear, with real instruments you can touch embedded in every lesson.
Learn synthesis by doing, free
There is no video to sit through and nothing to install. Play a full online synthesizer with two oscillators, a resonant filter, envelopes, an LFO and effects. Train your ears with the sound matching game, where you rebuild hidden patches by listening. Go beyond the basics with interactive lessons on FM synthesis, wavetable synthesis, granular synthesis and physical modeling. Then take everything to a real instrument with the Vital synth tutorial. Free forever, no account, no catch.