Lots of good resources here already, so I’ll share an opinion and an open question instead. IME the key concept while learning analog synthesis is understandin

Lots of good resources here already, so I’ll share an opinion and an open question instead. IME the key concept while learning analog synthesis is understanding control signals. For most synthesizers, this mainly means envelopes (for one-shot changes), LFOs (for cyclic changes), and maybe the mod wheel (for help with learning how amplitude affects the control signal). Tying the control signals to “what you hear” is the big idea. You mentioned that you have an iPhone. I’m assuming you have a computer that you can use to watch/read some of these suggestions with, and I encourage you to get the simplest analog-modeling synth app that you can find on the iPhone in order to “play along” and exercise each concept you’re learning. That live exploration and immediate feedback is very important, whether you’re using physical knobs or not. A simpler synth will cut away all the extra stuff and help you grasp the fundamentals more clearly. Someone recommended Synth One. It is free and quite capable. I just fired up my copy and tried and failed to find an init patch to start building from. Its envelopes are not clearly labeled or intuitively tied to the things they modulate. I think it has multiple screens to navigate through. So I don’t think that’s the best option for your purposes. This leads to the question: does anyone know of a simple stripped-down synth engine, preferably one that fits all on one screen, that brudgers can use along with a guide to dig into the basics? Asking for that on a phone might be too much; you may be better off using the phone to read/watch and the PC to play with a simple JS synth. If you have multiple screens, that would work just as well. Key features: 1 or 2 voice oscillators (the available waveforms don’t matter) Keyboard- or mouse- or touch-triggered note input option (sequencers muddy the waters) Amp tied to an ADSR Envelope Filter tied to an ADSR Envelope LFO tied to something (pitch or filter cutoff) The simpler the better, I cannot stress this enough! Brudgers doesn’t need a patch bay or customized routing to learn about filter cutoff and LFOs and ADSR envelopes. Cut out the noise, save it for later. It’s okay if those things are present, as long as it’s easy to get to an init patch and ignore them. “Subtractor from Reason as a web app” is a good upper bound of what I have in mind here.