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Hey, everyone starts somewhere. I hope I can point you in a decent direction here:


I started with hardware via guitar pedals and Nicolas Collins' "Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking" and have now moved into things like modular analog synthesis, Max/MSP (or Pure Data), and Supercollider. Of course there are many paths to go about understanding how to synthesize sounds, and why certain sound tools like biquad filters are necessary or convenient, but it is best for you to figure out how and why you would want to use those ideas for yourself.


One thing you have to understand is timbre. I'm not going to go into detail about it, because you seem motivated enough to lead your own path, but timbre is probably the most important reason sound synthesis exists. Think about it, the people who created synthesizers (E-mu, Moog, Bell Labs, etc.) wanted to make it easier to make "full" music without having to use a huge orchestra of people, so they figured out how to recreate the sounds of the instruments, the "timbres." At this point the timbres of synthesizers are their own, rather than trying to simulate others, and are what make synthesizers such an interesting part of musical instrument history.


Once you understand why timbre is so important, then you can look into what "voices" in synthesizers are. A simple "voice" in a synthesizer consists of three main components: An oscillator (or noise generator), a filter, and an voltage controlled amplifier that is usually controlled by an envelope generator. That is a really crude description of what a voice is, but that is why there are very expensive synthesizers with capabilities of their "voices" that are versatile and desirable depending on their design and components. And that is the main reason why things like a biquad filter are useful in certain situations.


I'm not going to go on too much longer here, but I will say one last thing about sound synthesis that will prove useful. That is that in sound theory, or the scientific analysis of sound (physics, acoustics, even psychoacoustics), it is theorized that every single timbre can be analyzed resolutely down to its constituents; every sound can be represented by a given number of sinusoidal frequencies (the more frequencies, the greater accuracy of the sound). That is a big one to bite into, and has a lot to do with "additive synthesis," but I feel that it is very important to understand this about sound theory in order to be proficient in sound synthesis.


Just for fun, a quote from one of my instructors, the one that taught the analog synthesis class I took: "Trying to filter a sine wave is the definition of futility."


Good luck out there, sound synthesis is a wide world of weird nerdy stuff.

I strongly suggest to not be ideological about sound design. You will get much better results by using a variety of approaches.

So I will suggest two books.

Dsigning Sound: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008H5QA04/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_qSjvCb8BYTJVC

That has a lot of theory and practice stuff.

And I will recommend my own book for actually making the sounds. It's called Sound Synthesis in Java: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00Z57L2N2/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_OTjvCbZHFMMXV

But overall I just encourage you to experiment with all the tools available to you!

So much of it everything you can find with tutorials online but if you want a comprehensive reference just about everything synthesizers do and can do then I haven't seen anyone explain it as simply as the guy who wrote this book. Power Tools for Synthesizer Programming.

Yes. Syntorial and https://www.amazon.com/Synthesizer-Basics-Dean-Friedman/dp/0711910227

The book has a video format on YouTube.

Also https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/search?q=learn+basics&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all

This book has a bunch of recipes like that.

It's going through a wah pedal.

https://www.amazon.com/Dunlop-GCB95-Guitar-Effects-Pedal/dp/B0002CZVK0

edit: maybe it isn't, but essentially that is whats happening, maybe it's an onboard filter