Need some advice for creating sounds

I think you could be taking the right approach (hearing sounds and trying to recreate them), my approach has been a little different but I've become quite proficient at using synths (rarely have any preconceived ideas I just synthesise for the fact it's so fun). Personally I never use presets, I don't think this makes me any better or worse than anyone else it's just that's synthesis is the sole reason for me using a synth so it kind of defeats the object - I mention this because reverse engineering patches is one way of learning synthesis. There are too many tutorials to even begin linking but as mention SOS have a really nice "synth secrets" series and there are more tutorials on youtube than you can shake a stick at (individually, would be pretty easy to shake one at them all together). Lots of practice helps and having an instrument that actually inspires / talks to you would really help (such as the Sequential Prophet 6 though it's not cheap) so would getting better at dissecting sounds (there's a lot you can do without experience too such as using a oscilloscope to inspect wave shapes or filters to isolate specific frequency bands). Receiving exact settings for patches / presets will not help you so try to keep that in mind. Not 100% sure on the sound (there are a few too) but it does sound like it uses saw and / or square waves and there is some lowpass filter treatment in there too (tbh the filter is where most of your sound is going to come from and kind of the focal point of most [subtractive] synthesis) - don't know what the mkorg is capable of but I've seen one and it looks like there's lots of menu diving involved in patch design, you could be better off with something like softsynth (use the korg as a controller) - imo the mkorg isn't a good example of a synthesiser, you want something that inspires and captivates you with many many knobs to play with.

/r/synthesizers Thread