Synth Up Your Sound part 1: Making Waves

The Minimoog's Oscillators

Electro-Harmonix' Microsynth is a great synth-in-a-box

Today there are several ways to control a synthesiser, virtual or the real deal, with your guitar.  But what if you just want to add some “synthy” sounds  to your rig without using special pick ups or a guitar-shaped controller thingy?  I’ll break down some ways to add  some Moog to your Marshall.

What is a “synthy” sound?  With today’s software and hardware synthesisers the answer is, Anything.  I’m gonna focus on classic analog subtractive synthesis and the most classic of all synths the mighty Minimoog.  Bear in mind that a series of “standard” guitar pedals hooked up to an amp is synthesis so you’ve had your toes wet this whole time.  The ways I’ll talk about are just “synthier” sounding.  There are some great pedals on the market that are one-stop-synth boxes but let’s now look at how we can get synthish tones with simpler pedals.

Let’s talk about oscillators and some ideas on how you can “ape” them with pedals:

Multiple Voices
The origin of an analog synth’s sound lies in it’s oscillators.  In a Minimoog there are three oscillators.  This means that when a note is played it can play up to 3 “voices” simultaneously.  Each oscillator can be set to a different octave in either direction creating a a three part tripled harmony.
How to get them
There are now so many pedals that can can add octaves and harmonies to your sound that the choice is yours.  Let’s use the example of simple octave up and octave down pedals.

The EHX Micro POG is your tone x 3

Varied Wave Forms
Guitar for the most part is a sine wave.  Each oscilators of the Mini Moog can produce either sine, square, triangle, saw or pulse waves.   

A ColecoVision fighting a Speak & Spell to the death

The Zvex Fuzz Probe turns your movements into splattey waves

How to get them
Clip them peaks!  You can’t produce a true square wave out of a standard electric guitar to my knowledge but you can sure hack up a sine wave til it sounds like one.  Don’t go for a smooth overdrive here.  Big, brittle fuzzes and crackly distortion can do the job nicely.  To push it even further, try a bit reduction pedal to get that wave jagged.  A pulse wave can be created with a vibrato or tremolo pedal.



To get into synth territory, try running an octave down pedal then fast vibrato pedal in paralel with an octave up plus a jagged fuzz.  Adjust the blend of each signal to get a three octave voice with varied waveforms.

That’s just a simple example.  There are pedals that provide several voices all on there own. It’s up to you to find out what you want/don’t want.