The Basics

A synthesizer is an electronic musical instrument that creates sound through a specific set of processes. An electric keyboard, that expensive piece of Moog equipment, and those strange modules connected by tiny wires—all synthesizers. Synthesis means to combine ideas to form a theory or system, and that’s exactly what synthesizers do: they put together various processes to form sounds. A synthesizer combines these various processes in one machine. In a self-contained or keyboard synthesizer, these steps are already automatically connected. In a modular synthesizer, you are required to connect - or 'patch' these steps to each other.