Making a synth sound “fatter” and more analog
Alright, there will be one time or another, where you might want to take a synth sound and make it sound fatter and more analog. This kind of sound is difficult to reproduce in soft synths. Most quality digital soft synths, try to have their own distinct digital sound, leaving analog-like sounds to dedicated analog emulation synths.
One of the best emulations I have heard is Arturia’s Analog Factory. Another one is Admiral Polyanna. Native Instrument’s Pro – 53 is also very good. Finally, Spectrasonics latest achievement, Omnisphere, contains many analog sampled waveforms.
Arturia Analog Factory
However, there will be times when you want to create your own analog emulation, or try to make a sound even better. First of all, you should know that you have to choose the right synths for the job. Not all synths are really for this kind of of task. If you have been trying for over 2 hours to make something sound good, but you can’t, chances are that you are using the wrong tools 
Now, let’s get to the point. To make a sound fatter, you need to have some kind of dissonance in it. First of all, don’t use sine waves, because they contain only one harmonic: the fundamental. We want harsher waveforms. We have to use square or saw waves.
A powerful tool to cause dissonance is pulse width modulation (PWM). This constantly changes the width of the square wave, which translates into a more dissonant sound.
The second way to create dissonance, is through the tuning of our oscillators. You can lower and raise them by a few cents, in order not to be in tune. Additionaly, if you want a bass sound, you should lower all of them, or some of them, an octave.
So, this was really the basic idea! Now, to make the sound fatter, you can use effects. Chorus is a good idea, because, slight amounts of it are not very noticable, but make the sound more dissonant. Distortion is always an option, but you might want to use a good VST effect, because most distortions built in soft synths might not be the best option. Finally, if your sound is not as good as you wanted it to be, you can always layer another sound on top of it! You can also add reverb, which helps to make every sound more organic, even though reverb is the most abused effect, because it can improve any sound.
October 2nd, 2010 at 11:59 am
The moog modular V is the most analog sounding softsynth I ever experienced.Arturia teamed up with Bob Moog himself to create it. I’ve got a real korgpolysix in my room as well. I try to program the analog “shortcomings” of it in the MMV. I Turn up the “voice detune” pot (near keyboard) a bit, to make your oscillators drift a tiny bit out of tune and add something like -60dB of white noise in the mixer ( real vca’s are always a bit noisy). I actually fooled a mastering engineer when I did that ! (told him the truth afterwards, of course). Something softsynths
really can’t emulate (to my ears) is the resonance of a real wet analog filter. I’m thinking about buying a real modular system for that reason
(If my wallet allows…..)
Routing the softsynths sound signal through a real preamp (not necessarily
tube) does a great deal as well. Routing digital or fm synths (e.g. FM 8)and even qsample based rhythm boxes through a tube preamp sounds gorgeous !
October 12th, 2010 at 7:46 pm
Rebirth TB303 + rewire + fx = massive analog bass
simple things
February 17th, 2012 at 3:47 am
Run it through a guitar amp with a little spring reverb and double track it back in. Set up some mics around the room as well. Makes the sound a little more unpredictable.
Bingo.
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