General synthesis questions

Greets,

I'm become somewhat dissatisfied trying to create sounds by trial and error. For instance, in programs like Absynth I have a hard time keeping envelope properities as precise as I'd like to. Keeping the sounds "Snapped to time"(Sorry about any missuse of terminology, I'm rather new at this) seems troublesome. I'd like to be able to imagine a sound, input ADSR parameters, and refine the process until I am satisfied with the similarity between the finished sound and my inital imagined sound. I'd like to postpone the synthesis process until I have a pretty good idea how to acheive the desired sound.

questions:
1). Any suggestions for programs?
2). Am I making this way too complicated?
3). Has sampling made this process needless (i.e. sending sample data)
4). Can anybody suggest some books, articles, websites, etc.?

60000 / bpm. Gives you the length of a bar at that tempo. I wouldn't follow that exactly, but gives you a rough guide to how to keep your ADSR 'in time'

If you want precision, you will get it a lot easier by sampling /bouncing your synth and editing the audio.

If you want to learn more about synthesis, Sound on Sound has a long-running series named Synth Secrets :

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/allsynthsecrets.htm

It goes pretty deep into the technical details, though.

I've found that a great way to understand synthesis is to get some sort of modular synth and just figure out what the basic modules are doing, then wire some of them together to see how they influence each other, and so on...

[Macc]

Practice practice practice... As my Grandad says, 'It doesn't all just fall out of the sky'...

Sorry, but it's the truth!

thanks for the pointers, and reading material
I'll try and be as patient as I can

Absynth has a v. handy feature - you can load-in presets for each 'module' in your patch.
If you right-click (ctrl+click?) on Filter 1 for example - it should bring a up a whole list of preset filter settings. (of course you can save your own - to help make patch creation faster in future).

Means you can build up a custom patch v. quickly and then tweak to taste. - handy for learning as well.