robert_e_bone
By the way, here is a link to the first of a 12-part free series of articles from Sound on Sound, walking you through analog synthesis:
 
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1997_articles/jun97/synthschool1.html
 
The links for the rest of this series are also present on the above page.
 
I TRULY hope these will help you, and will help reduce some of the frustration when trying to get things to sound like what is in your head. :)
 
Bob Bone
 

Good shout Bob I remember reading these on the train to and from work each month as they came out, most informative.  I still have the mag's in a storage compartment of the Millennium Falcon somewhere.

The Synclavier is something else though I can see hours of fun.

I made the fatal error of installing the Synclavier demo on the DAW, (previously it was on the Internet PC with crappy sound and no MIDI keyboard) now I am hooked and will probably end up doing the full upgrade which will cost me 199 Euros.  I think it’s worth the extra 99 euros on its own.
 
I have not delved too deeply into the programming but it seems pretty intuitive with graphic editing of the amplitude and harmonic envelopes of each partial. As for the other tabs they look reasonably straightforward with the exception of "Time Slices" which I will have to research. It sounds gorgeous and I was able to make purposeful tweaks to the sound straight away.
 
I also installed the demo of the B3 and I think I may have been doing it an injustice.  I said before I liked the percussion but it also seems very good at the distorted end of the B3 sounds. I certainly don’t need it but I will certainly find a use for it. Also because of the way it’s modelled it will do more off the wall sounds beyond the scope of my existing Hammond organ options.
 
I won’t come off the fence for a day or too but I think I know which side I am likely to come off.

I'm looping a section of a song and playing through some presets in Analog Lab 2.
A few of them cause the audio engine to drop out - but I'm finding a handful of them are actually causing SONAR to crash :-\
Is anyone else seeing this?
PS - don't try to save any presets or edit any user presets unless you hit "Give all keystrokes to plugin" - or you'll be running keyboard shortcuts in SONAR rather than typing a preset name...

I have just been under the hood in the Farafisa V. That user waveform is a thing of wonder. You can essentially create a waveform by using what loos like a massive graphic EQ. It has two modes, additive, were each slider is a harmonic and shape where you use them to draw a waveform. One can make some very nice (or nasty) tones.