Subtractive synthesis: the whole chain
Oscillator, filter, two envelopes, an LFO — every module you have met, finally playing as one instrument.
You already know every part in this lesson. What you have not done is hold them as one instrument: an oscillator makes a bright recipe, a filter carves it, one envelope shapes loudness, another shapes brightness, an LFO keeps something moving underneath. That chain — source → filter → amplifier, with modulators aimed at it — is subtractive synthesis, and it is the floor plan of nearly every synthesizer ever sold.
Why this order
The order is the logic of lessons 2 through 6 played forward: you can only carve harmonics that exist, so the rich wave comes first and the filter second; loudness is the last thing the listener meets, so the amp stage sits at the end. The modulators — envelopes and LFOs — are not in the audio path at all. They stand beside it, hands on the knobs, which is why the same envelope could drive loudness in lesson 3 and cutoff in lesson 5 without the audio routing changing at all.
A complete little synthesizer. Start from each preset — bass, lead, pad — hold a note, and then find which single control matters most to its character: the bass lives on its filter envelope, the lead on wave + cutoff, the pad on slow attack and the LFO. Then break each preset on purpose and rebuild it.
This chain is why every Elektron device's page row looks the way it does: TRIG → source page → FLTR → AMP → LFO/MOD is the rack, left to right. The machines below are each device's take on the source slot — everything after them you have already bridged in lessons 4–6: