Make Your Synths Sound More Analog

Many modern electronic music genres incorporate analog synth sounds. Compared to plainer digital, its character, and warmth of sound are generally more pleasing to the ear. You'll hear it a lot in Synth-Pop from the 1980s, as well as present Melodic House and Techno. In the following article, we'll show you how to make your synths sound more analog with modern soft synths, which are getting better and better at reproducing analog sounds.

In order to make your synths sound more analog, we've created a short sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW that contains most of the whole mix's elements. Let's listen.

To begin, we'll choose a soft synth: Serum by Xfer. After placing it on a newly generated MIDI channel in the SoundBridge: DAW, we'll open it and check its interface. The oscillator A section can be found in the upper left corner of the interface. We can select a waveform from the dropdown menu. Then, we can increase the number of unison voices and slightly detune it. So, let's hear how our arp sequence sounds with base settings.

After we've finished with the waveform section and detuning, we'll go on to the envelop and filter sections. As shown in the image below, the envelope attack time has been slightly increased, while the decay and release times have been set to roughly 1 second. Secondly, we'll select the envelope section to be modulated by the filter cutoff and temporarily decrease the cutoff value. We may add more analog flavor by activating the noise oscillator on the left side of the interface. We'll select the BrightWhite noise setting and adjust the level and pitch values here. Let's compare the difference to the default sound setting.

Finally, we'll finish our sound in the Serum FX section. As you can see in the image below, we've used some distortion, EQ, delay, and reverb effects to help blend our sound into the overall mix.

Finally, we'll automate the cutoff parameter of our synth arp. Sequence and listen to how it sounds in the context of the entire mix.