1.3 Synthesis · Additive
Additive Synth Explorer
Every rich sound is simple tones stacked up. Pick one, watch it get built, hear it.
Watch it build
Every harmonic is its own spinning circle
Each harmonic keeps its own colour — here as a spinning circle, and in the spectrum below as a matching bar. Stack the circles and the last point traces out the wave across the screen.
Pick a sound
Pure — One clean tone — just the base note, nothing stacked on top. The simplest sound there is.
The harmonics inside
Each bar is one harmonic's strength — the same colour as its circle above. This bar-code is the timbre; a DAW's spectrum analyser shows you the same thing for any recording.
Build your own — nudge the eight harmonics
Why this matters for the exam
- 1.3 Synthesis — additiveThis whole page is additive synthesis: build a rich timbre by stacking simple tones above the base note, one slider per harmonic.
- 1.11 EQEvery EQ move — cut, boost, shelf — changes the height of certain bars on this spectrum. Brighter means taller bars on the right; warmer means shorter ones.
- The spectrum analyserEvery DAW has one. Point it at any recording and it shows this same bar-chart of what is in the sound — the picture you are building here, read the other way round.
The other way round. Here you build a sound up from nothing. A subtractive synth starts with a waveform that already has all of these harmonics in it, and takes them away with a filter.
Subtractive Synth Explorer →