Trying to Love Z3TA+ 2

2:43AM
Hey Tom, can you elaborate a little bit on how Syntorial may or may not have helped you?  Having gone through the entire program/course, perhaps you can lend a little feedback, not only on Z3TA+2 but also sound design in general.  Do you find yourself building better patches now from scratch?  Did it make you "good enough" to parse out a sound from an artist's album and design it yourself maybe with 75% accuracy?

Sure. I would say my ear is a lot better tuned for hearing different sound attributes and knowing which knob to reach for. I can say it's a lot easier to dissect the sounds on recordings and get pretty close. So yeah, at least 75%. One thing to remember is that there are a lot of sounds that are made from patches on 2 or more different synths. It's a lot easier to find those sounds when you can describe the parts. I find myself listening to songs on the radio now and thinking that's a bunch of detuned saws with such and such filter envelope and a delayed LFO routed to oscillator pitch, etc.
 
I think to start with, you want to get good on one synth, Z3TA+2 isn't a bad place to start. After you know what you're doing on one, try a couple more, get Sylenth or Massive and learn how to make the same sounds on them. Once you've got the subtractive and routing stuff down, you can pretty much apply it to any synth. Most synths have their own sounds and unique features, different oscillators, filters, envelopes, etc. even though the basics are the same. You're not going to get wave shaping like Z3TA+2 on a Sylenth or Massive, but you're also not going to be able to duplicate Sylenth multi-voice oscillators or Massive wave table position morphing very well on Z3TA+2. You can also only get so far with subtractive synthesizers, you're still going to need good wavetable sampler like Kontakt or Dimension Pro, drums too.
 
You can also get a lot of mileage out of post-processing using EQ, compressors, sidechaining, filters, etc. Something that starts out as a grand piano can morph into something completely different that would be hard to recognize as a piano. Post processing can get as involved as creating a patch.
 
For me, most of the time it's easier and faster to start with an init patch than it is to hunt through all the presets to find something close. Some stuff takes minutes, some stuff still takes days, sometimes you don't realize how close your patch is until you listen to it the next morning. :)
 
It's instructive to download stems and listen to them, Calvin Harris made the stems for 'We Found Love' available on his SoundCloud for a while. When you solo them, the parts are easy to figure out and give you a glimpse into how to put things together to get TheSound(tm). More often than not it's a combination of a bunch of stuff that fits together nicely that makes the track. The eureka moment is when you discover the Fender Rhodes on 'Stairway to Heaven'. :)