Software Synthesizers (Excerpt): Top Music Technology Pages Return to MusicWords Home

[The material below is excerpted from Software Synthesizers, published in 2003 by Backbeat Books.]

All of the instruments mentioned above had one thing in common: They were discrete, free-standing pieces of hardware. In the beginning, analog electronics were the norm, but as time went on, more and more hardware synthesizers had digital circuity inside -- essentially, miniature computers dedicated to performing one particular task. Most digital synths produced from the early '80s onward used custom-engineered digital chips. At the time, the general-purpose chips in home computers simply weren't fast enough to do much in the way of digital synthesis.

Mercy, how times have changed.

The instruments discussed in this book have no physical existence as hardware. They consist entirely of software -- essentially, long series of instructions that tell a computer how to make sounds, and what to show on the screen while doing so. The code that makes up a software synthesizer is not so very different from the code that tells your computer how to be a word processor, a Web browser, or a video game.

The software for a softsynth arrives in your computer, typically, in one of two ways. Either you install it from a CD-ROM, or you download it over the Internet. In either case, the softsynth usually has to be installed. During installation, one or more files are stored on your computer's hard drive. If you look at the hard drive's directory, you'll find them in a folder named after the program or the company that distributes it.

Once the software is installed, you may be able to run it pretty much the way you would any other program, by double-clicking on the appropriate desktop icon or (on a Windows PC) selecting it from the Start menu. If it's a plug-in, however, you'll need to instantiate it (jargon for "create an instance of it" -- in other words, tell the computer that you'd like to use it now) from within a host program. In either case, when you do this the software is loaded from the hard drive into your computer's RAM, and you're ready to jam.

Or almost ready. In order to make music with your new softsynth, you need at least one and preferably two additional components. First, you need a way to get audio out of the computer and into a pair of speakers. Usually this means some sort of soundcard. Helpful but not always required: a MIDI keyboard with which to play the synth. We'll have more to say below about both of these components.