Subtractive, additive, FM, wavetable, granular, physical modelling and the rest — each with its actual mechanism, its signature sound, and what its knobs will respond to.
Synthesis sounds like one thing and is really a family of genuinely different techniques for producing a sound from nothing. Knowing which one an instrument in front of you is using tells you immediately what its controls will respond to — a cutoff knob on a subtractive synth and an index knob on an FM synth are not the same kind of object, and approaching one as though it were the other wastes an afternoon.
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