
Originally Posted by
scrapheaper
Sylenth is a bit of beginners synth imo. It does cover the basics very well, but a lot of people find it limiting as it doesn't do FM, waveshaping/wavetable or sample based synthesis. Massive is one option for a general purpose synth with a few more bells and whistles, but don't think it's the only option- I personally think serum, synthmaster and z3ta 2+ are just as fully featured (if not more) and cost less money.
The classic (and probably overused) dubstep growls are usually made by FM synthesis. Massive can do this, but it's a bit limited and a specialist FM synth such as FM8, Toxic biohazard is much more useful- have a look at the seamlessr tutorials. There are some pretty powerful FM stock synths which are definitely capable of making formant-y growls- if you own FL studio or Ableton you could definitely use operator or sytrus to make such a sound.
In terms of how formants are related to vowel sounds, you are correct in saying that formants don't change with the pitch of the sound. Vowel sounds are created by specific sets of frequencies of formants- I believe the wikipedia page on formants can tell you which exact frequencies you need to make the an 'a' an 'ee' an 'oo' etc.
When designing sounds to sound vowelly, here are three methods I use. One is to just play around with synthesis until you happen to hit on something vowelly by chance- FM synthesis often does this, so does sample rate reduction and certain combinations or resonant filters.
A more deliberate approach would be to use vocoding or a formant filter (I like forma-8, especially as it's free), which deliberately introduce formants that are the same as the ones generated by a human voice.
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