Synth Basics

The SubTractor controls will be familiar to anyone with experience in analog synthesis, but if this isn't you, the next sections provide a crash course. This will mean a lot of new concepts and plenty of exercises illustrating how the many controls work. Take heartlearning the SubTractor will teach you most of the fundamental synthesizer concepts necessary to use Reason's other instruments, too.

The examples will focus on listening to, understanding, and adjusting different types of controls. When you're done, you'll have a working knowledge of filters, LFOs, envelopes, modulation, and play parameters.

To follow along with the exercises, you'll first need to create a patch with "neutral" settingsin other words, one that zeros out the various control sections so that we can learn about them one at a time.

To create and save a test patch

1.	Initialize your SubTractor by choosing Edit > Initialize Patch, or right-click the front panel and choose Initialize Patch (Figure 5.9). Figure 5.9. Initializing a SubTractor's patch sets all the knobs to their default settings.
2.	In the Velocity section of the SubTractor's front panel, set the F.Env knob to the middle (Figure 5.10). The red indicator light will go out. Figure 5.10. Disengage the velocity section (F.Env) before saving a test patch. The velocity knobs alter the tones, and we want to disable them to hear the oscillators in their "raw" beginning stage.
3.	Click the File icon to the right of the patch name to open the Save dialog box.
4.	Name your patch test patch, and save it somewhere that's easy to find again. Now we're ready to start learning about and listening to the SubTractor.