I'm just starting out with a midi controller and a bunch of synth plugins, diving down the rabbit hole of youtube tutorials and personal experimentation. And it's fantastic! There's some real magic in having all the noises that send shivers up and down my spine and tickle the brain at my fingertips.
But since I'm just starting out and I'm kinda drinking from the firehose of trying to learn music theory, the basics of how to play with piano keys and midi pads, and synth sound design all at the same time, basically all those amazing sounds at my fingertips are either fun presets or happy accidents from turning knobs at random to see what it does.
I'd love to get to the point of having some notion of a sound in my head (say, a trumpet or a kick*) and have an idea of how to get to that sound. I mean, I'm sure "happy accidents" will pretty much always be a thing, but it feels like for making my own music it'll help if I have a good idea of how to get in the general ballpark of a sound I'd like to use even if it takes a while to fine tune. And while there is the approach of starting from an exiting preset or following a tutorial and then personalizing, that's not really a substitute for just having the knowledge needed to take a stab directly.
So I guess I'm just trying to level set my expectations on how long it might take to accumulate that level of experience and knowledge (I'm already guessing on the order of years). How long did it take y'all to get to the point of feeling like you had a good grasp of what knobs to turn and sliders to adjust and waveforms (and number of oscillators and LFOs) to turn the idea of a sound into something coming out of the machine? And tangentially, did you specialize on one kind of synthesis first, or did you spread your attention between additive, subtractive, and FM when you were starting out?
^(*I do not want tips on how to recreate a specific sound here. Just using these as examples of the sorts of things a person might want to design from scratch.)