Synthesis and Sound Design: The Complete Beginner's Guide (Udemy.com)

Great primer to synthesizers. Took the overwhelm of all the functionality and simplified it to its essence allowing me to navigate different synths with much more confidence. Loved that Steve not only went into the basics of synths but also showed how to create basic sounds as a starting point like Kick, Snare, Bass, Piano, Pad, etc! For me, the value and knowledge was totally worth the time and price!

This course was an absolute blast from start to finish. I enjoyed every single section—and that doesn’t happen often with online courses! The instructor really knows his stuff and explains everything in a way that actually makes sense (which is rare when it comes to sound design…). He doesn’t just show what to do, but also why you’re doing it—which made a huge difference for me. It’s a very comprehensive course, but never overwhelming. Somehow, he makes complex topics feel surprisingly simple. Hands down the best Udemy course I’ve taken so far. Bonus: I went from randomly turning knobs in Vital and hoping for the best… to actually understanding what I’m doing. :-)

This was my first tutorial on this topic. As a first impression, it was pretty good. It seemed to be the instructor’s first tutorial as well. The presentation included a lot of filler words like “aem” or “aeh.” His speech wasn’t very fluent either. During the presentation, he kept fumbling around, which suggests poor preparation. In that regard, there’s still room for improvement to make the tutorial better. Overall, it provided a general overview of the topic.

It´s a really decent basic course to teach me the first steps in actually creating and learning to understand synthesis and Vital. I like the way complex processes are being summarized and the practical examples given. Also I like the way that this course also helps you understanding oldschool and other synths. And I specially liked the part where we where building a 80´s synth, the 80´s is my starting point (Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre, Nova) for loving synthesizers. Allthough i have a lot of 80 synth vsts (Korg, Roland) ... this was really educational and fun!

This is all about the basics of Synthesizers, discussed in great detail and with the goal to use it in future. Not only what the buttons of synthesizers are for but also how to connect the parts (oscillators, LFO, amplifier,...) with each other to create a specific sound. Then, there are given examples for the most common instruments (some drums, bass, e piano) as a point of start. For me as a beginner it was exactly what I`ve been searching for to get a whole idea of synthesizers. The teacher is great in explaining and had answers to all my questions even though I didn't ask but just watched the videos.

A really excellent course which has given me a much better understanding of creating sounds on a synth. As a 65 year old Im late to the show but wanted to get more out of my setup then just selecting presets. This course has fulfilled that brief and some. As an addendum. I liked the last section as the Steve demoed 3 synths in addition to Vital (the synth used on the course). He clearly was using them for the 1st time so was a voyage of discovery for both instructor and student. Have caught on early that was what he was doing, I decided to try and apply my knowledge before watching each one and we was pleased to see that we both trod a similar path. Shows how effective the course was.

This course is a very good intro to synthesizers. I watched it with no prior experience apart from randomly twisting knobs until a cool sound appeared. I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to learn the fundamentals (what the signal chain looks like, how to use the components, and some background history.) One thing that could use some improvement is the auto generated subtitles. I had to turn them off because of how inaccurate they were. All in all I got what I expected from this course. I didn't become a synth expert, but I did learn the fundamentals in just a few days. Thanks Steve!

The basics of sound synthesis demystified: simple enough to follow along, but covered in enough depth to build on. I liked that the course was conversational and fairly short. Steve avoids the trap of getting bogged down in too much detail for a beginner. I now feel confident to keep on learning those details---while finally understanding how everything fits together. Also walking away with an excellent new synth (Vital) and some solid hands on skills to use immediately. Finally, as a Linux user, a HUGE thanks for keeping the course platform agnostic!

This is easily one of the best courses I've ever been through. Simple explanations, thorough coverage of the synthesizer, and the example sound creation completely blunts the intimidation I had when I thought I might want to get into this. So very well done, sir. I'm grabbing the sampler course next. I hope you find the time and gift us with more courses like this in the future. I will surely check them out.

I cannot stress enough how helpful this course has been for me! It provides a very well structured and easily digestable / easy-to-understand explanation of how synthesizers and sound design in general work on the most fundamental level, and even the Patches that are created in this course are of very good quality. The Pad sound in particular sounds way better than I expected. Some feedback that I could provide is to plan / take a few notes before recording, as sometimes the explanations do slow down a little too much - but overall this is a very minor complaint, considering how good the explanations themselves are. I would love to see more courses from this instructor in the future - whether that be more advanced sound design / Vital usage, or music theory, or anything else that's music-related! Certainly I would be happy to see more patches added to the Sound Design section of this course as well.