Synthesist / Sound Designer — deep DSP to a performed live synth rig

This path is for the synthesist whose instrument is the synthesis engine itself — someone who wants to understand and design sound from physical and mathematical first principles, build an original voice vocabulary across every major synthesis paradigm, and ultimately step on stage (or hit record) and perform a live rig built entirely from sounds they made. The north-star performance is a continuous, unassisted 8–12 minute live synth-rig set: real-time granulation of a live captured source, layered across self-designed instruments, paced by scripted modulation and free-rhythm automation.

The path rises through five segments of increasing fidelity. It opens by training the ear and the eye: How Sound Works and Inside Digital Audio establish that every design decision is a spectral decision, and Subtractive Voice Design closes the segment with the first whole authentic task — three contrasting voices from a single oscillator/filter/envelope chain, narrated as spectral choices. From there the second segment fans out across the full synthesis palette: FM, additive resynthesis, wavetable scanning, granular clouds, drum synthesis, and bass design are all tackled as discrete methods, each producing a portfolio piece that anchors what that technique is uniquely suited to. Delay Lines and Comb Filters rounds out the palette by showing how time-domain effects are themselves synthesis operations.

The third segment is the deep-DSP core that distinguishes this path from a generalist producer track. Advanced FM: Multi-Operator Voices pushes to full six-operator acoustic emulation; Microsound goes to Xenakis-level granular structure; Spectral Analysis and Processing introduces the phase vocoder; Voice and Formant Synthesis builds a morphing sung vowel from the source-filter model; and Physical Modeling: Karplus-Strong completes the arc with a waveguide instrument. Advanced filter design, waveshaping, reverb, and optional genre and procedural modules round out a toolkit for designing any imagined sound from scratch.

The fourth segment shifts from design to performance infrastructure: Leads, Pads, and Performance Voices produces the first truly playable instruments, while SuperCollider: Coding Synthesis from UGens to Patterns establishes the live-codable engine that ties everything together. The path closes with a single capstone module — Performing a Live Synth Rig — where every prior skill converges into one unassisted set.

The path deliberately skips track arrangement, finishing, and release (handed off to the producer path), modular/Eurorack hardware (handed off to the dawless-performer path), and pattern-language performance in Tidal or Strudel (handed off to the live-coder path). Deep mixing and mastering appear only as a thin optional cluster — enough to make voices translate in context, not to master a release. There are no assumed prerequisites: every dependency is included earlier in the path itself.