From a musical perspective the analog mental model produces very clean and high quality results. My experience of advanced digital techniques is that they sound somehow lower quality.
This is not to be confused with the analog/digital debate, In which I am a fan of digital: digital synths that use the analog mental model can and do sound great e.g. virus, sylenth, zebra, fm8. It's more that the analog model evolved from how our ears perceive things while newer paradigms while mathematically neat often lead to unwanted artifacts, or boil down to much the same sort of thing as before e.g. NI Razor.
Then again we might be talking about different things bitL, if you want to post links to the sort of sounds you're talking about then I'm all ears.
Rick Snoman is fairly basic though I'd say the definitive synth guide was the old Sound on Sound Synth Secrets series (google). Or better just hang out on forums with more experienced people and post up links to sounds you like saying 'how do I make this?'
> It's more that the analog model evolved from how our ears perceive things while newer paradigms while mathematically neat often lead to unwanted artifacts,
There are basically two approaches to designing sounds: you either model perception of audio or you model the physics that produces audio. Analog (subtractive, additive, FM) synthesis is basically entirely in the first camp. Digital is strictly more flexible so you have more options, like Karplus Strong, which gives you a simplified model of a plucked string.
The most "mathematically neat" synthesis techniques are still the old analog models: you start with a simple mathematical function like a sawtooth wave and put it through a four-pole filter. Or you stack a few different overtones on top of a fundamental. It's hard to get more simple/neat in terms of the math. The digital synths can be fairly complicated, mathematically, when they're not emulating analog synths.
I don't know what you're talking about when you say that advanced digital techniques sound somehow lower quality.
Things like impulse responses are everywhere, like reverb, guitar amp sims, and distortion plugins. They sound better than ever.
> or boil down to much the same sort of thing as before e.g. NI Razor.
Wait, what? I own a copy of NI Razor and I don't see how it boils down to the "same sort of thing as before". Sure, it's an additive synth, and that has existed before, but it's not really a rehash of something I'd seen before, it has controls which simply don't exist in other synthesizers.
I'll bite on some guesses, not sure which the OP is talking about.
A) Historically, before computing was fast enough, digital synthesizers often had major issues with aliasing (which could be defined as "lower quality", certainly it could be defined as unwanted artifacts. Although conversely some saw the aliasing as a sort of a "character").
IMHO this is no longer as big of a problem with the fast computing power today: techniques like oversampling, BLEP for oscillators, etc. exist to minimize aliasing. There is possibly a few mathematical issues out there for any "real time" oriented calculations due to the quantized nature of sampled audio, but software engineers even are coming up with techniques to deal with some of them (this paper -- https://www.native-instruments.com/fileadmin/ni_media/downlo... -- is well known for going over some solutions for filters for instance).
B) The other possibility: the nice thing (or not so nice thing, depending on your point of view) about subtractive synthesis with pure waveforms, is you are usually starting out with waveforms that are harmonic in nature (like a square wave or sawtooth). With techniques like additive (Razor's technique), digital FM / PM, or the like, it's much easier to get non-harmonic sounds. I wouldn't call this "lower quality", just different.
By "mathematically neat" I mean what you said; periodic function composition which is a nice general model in the mathematical sense but not specific to audio synthesis like the "ADSR" model is. So we may be singing from the same hymnbook here.
What I meant by advanced digital techniques is I suppose anything that takes things into the frequency domain, manipulates and converts back. Physical Modelling, Impulse Responses and Digital FM are all fine things but not in this category. I used to have a plugin that did weird things like let you stretch or clip the frequency domain for example. i.e. a 1-2khz bandlimited signal would become a 0.5-4khz signal. Some of the effects in Razor also do things in frequency domain that you wouldn't really do in the standard subtractive model.
My personal perception of Razor is that if you don't use those effects then it just sounds like a subtractive synth (same as before), while if you do use them it sounds a bit lo-fi (undesirable in my book though I appreciate that can be an artistic choice). Digital FM on the other hand sounds very clean to me.
This is not to be confused with the analog/digital debate, In which I am a fan of digital: digital synths that use the analog mental model can and do sound great e.g. virus, sylenth, zebra, fm8. It's more that the analog model evolved from how our ears perceive things while newer paradigms while mathematically neat often lead to unwanted artifacts, or boil down to much the same sort of thing as before e.g. NI Razor.
Then again we might be talking about different things bitL, if you want to post links to the sort of sounds you're talking about then I'm all ears.
Rick Snoman is fairly basic though I'd say the definitive synth guide was the old Sound on Sound Synth Secrets series (google). Or better just hang out on forums with more experienced people and post up links to sounds you like saying 'how do I make this?'