Any Reason users out there? Lets share creations!! !

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I'm into dark electronic music mainly, leaning towards the hi-tech trippy stuff.

I guess sound designing fits what I do the most since I've never really finished an actual track because my mind is chaos.

Probably MOST acoustic sounds (strings, brass, reeds, etc.) are sawtooth, which is why a filtered saw is such a strong foundation. But don't forget that acoustic resonating bodies shape the harmonic content as well. So while buzzing lips and rosin on strings may both share a similar effect, the end results of either are sharply distinguishable. Use a filtered saw as your base, and you don't have to work as hard fine tuning whatever coefficients you add to it.

There are exceptions, of course. A clarinet body resonates predominantly odd-numbered partials. So for some sounds you'd start with a filtered PWM, or a triangle, or whatever. You get a strongly-reinforced fundamental that gets you in the neighborhood while emphasizing or deemphasizing other harmonic coefficients gets you in the driveway.

32 harmonics was just an arbitrary number since anything much higher than that, especially going over 64 harmonics, isn't going to be all that detectable to the human ear. The only advantage to having a glut of sine operators is increased accuracy in reproducing a given sound. You could, for instance, knock your analog-modeled oscillator to 12 harmonics or less, bearing in mind that the closer you get to your fundamental, the more you're only going to hear a single sine (duh).

What I did in designing FM sounds for Synclavier was use Absynth as an analysis tool. I was unhappy with how the Synclavier handled harmonic resynthesis. The problem is that if you want the most accurate representation of a sound, you have to adjust the phase of a coefficient, not just the ratio. The Synclavier misses that important step if you use the resynthesis program. What I did was create the waveforms I wanted in Absynth, noted the levels of each coefficient as well as the phases, and manually punched in the ratios in the Real-Time Program and dialed in phases on the V/PK (Synclav term for "keyboard"). That was the only way I could get really close to what I came up with in Absynth. You can tell obvious differences between the Synclav and Absynth if you compare waveforms visually, but they aren't grossly different as you'd find using the resynthesis program. Sonically the difference is not that significant, although over time, without using filters, you can tell Absynth is a little more "clinical" sounding than the Synclavier.

The trouble lies in the fact that while the Synclavier technically uses 36 harmonics in FM synthesis, the end user can only access 24. This is where additive synthesis stops being fun. Because you need a lot more than 24 harmonics to get a realistic sound, the sounds actually generated are horribly "digital" sounding. There are ways to warm them up, of course, not to mention how eccentrically the Synclavier was designed and how that affects the output. But you're not going to get an EXACT imitation of another sound…not even close. But if all you want to deal with are pure sine waves, the results--and the effects seem to me more pronounced on more powerful, consumer-level soft-synths--are extremely irritating to most listeners (which is why I think you've lost your mind, but I do love to be proven wrong! ). I struggled with this in Cameleon 5000, which is supposed to be an emulation of the Kawai K5000. It's a FABULOUS concept, and I honestly admire what you're trying to do. The real challenge is figuring out how to get pleasing and musically useful results (which is why I want you to prove me wrong).

What I suggest instead is go for sinusoidal sounds that don't sound ear-piercingly sinusoidal. Start with a heavily filtered saw or pulse (you can use triangle, but it doesn't take much for them to more closely resemble sine waves) and build from there. Only emphasize sines or groups of sines that are going to have the greatest bearing on the timbre you're trying to design.

I don't have Thor open at the moment, but another suggestion, which is something you CAN'T do on the Synclavier (though it does do sampling), is use a comb-filtered noise source to emphasize harmonics at the ratios you want while maintaining a pretty wide spectrum of sound. You could do some beautiful, quasi-sinusoidal, atmospheric beds that way. You could, say, use three Thors for that. One would be your lpf fundamental saw or pulse, the second would be your comb-filtered noise (using note number as mod source, of course), and the third would be three sine or FM oscillators that would roughly match the center frequencies in your filtered noise. Getting your LPFs to self-resonate, of course, works, too, but I'm thinking a comb filter helps broaden the spectrum if you're going for a richer sound. I'm picturing something really breathy, maybe even flute-like. When I get a little time, I'll patch something up and post it so you can see what I mean. And I say use 3 thors just to be safe…you could PROBABLY squash it down to just two Thors.

MOST of the issues you're going to face have to do with Reason being predominantly rooted in subtractive synthesis rather than additive. Rather than fighting with it, use its strengths rather than its weaknesses to get the results you're going for.

But then, again…there's PARSEC. lol