god i love flutes, especially synthetic ones! i just assume it's a synth unless recorded before 1940 or whatever, there is no way of telling what anything is anymore. the important thing is that it's a beautiful sound.im too dumb to answer this. id inevitably nominate something that turn out to be a guitar or a flute. i think funky worm, as mentioned, is sublime but perhaps not a synth?
if i had to choose one it would be fingers' can you feel it bass. there are so many variants on it and i love em all.
i used to think it was a square wave, i made a few patches with a single square and some filter envelope action and got quite close. but i got even closer with 2 slightly detuned triangles, with less filter env action. on his rbma session, he says that he used a 'roland juno 2, which didn't even have midi' which suggest he was actually using a juno 6, as there's no such thing as a juno 2. and junos only have one osc so it would have been the built in chorus that gave it the effect of 2 detuned oscs. that's my guess anyway.
not really, a lot of the time when i see people ask how such and such a sound is made they end up getting a load of people whinging about not copying, being original etc. but there is info out there, you just have to dig for it. imo the best thing to do is just tweak and discover for yourself. preferably on a synth with dedicated knobs for it's main functions or a vst with a hardware controller. basically hands on as opposed to mouse and screen. subtractive synths are pretty simple and can make a big portion of the classic 'synth' sounds.
if you focus on (finely) detuned oscs, filter envelopes and lfos you should be able to get a lot of mileage. so many variants to be had just using the basics.
yeah, i'm probably gonna set a few hours aside to tinker with all the different modulation possibilities on the basic waves, see how far I get. When you talk about finely detuned oscs, do you mean to widen/fatten the sound, or for any other use?