It can often be too easy to over complicate your sounds!
Always try to start with as few a possible and only add when you need a thicker sound.
Just one oscillator is a very powerful thing when you know what to do with it!
As for learning to detect different waves its really (and I know it sucks to hear this!) an experience thing. After you've been using different sounds for a long time you start to learn what their characteristics are and how they react under certain manipulations.
I know how annoying it is to hear that, as we'd all love that special trick that means we can do it straight away!
So I'll try to give you a few pointers and ways you can speed up your learning.
Here's a breakdown of the waves.
Sawtooth - This is a very sharp sound, and a fundamental in many many synth sounds. If you don't know what to go to, then a saw is a foolproof try! It's very strong throughout the frequency spectrum, the basses are thick, and it's got a piercing high end. It can be filtered in any way you can imagine and so it's incredibly versatile.
Detuned its a very thick sound, think Van Halen - Jump.
When detuning more than two saws, you get into the supersaw territory, a godsend for people in the dance and rave world, no longer did they need to spend all their money on vast synths with 4 or more oscillators! Also with a slow attack, this is a fundamental in synthesizing strings!
Square/Pulse - This sound is similar to the saw, but its a bit smoother, almost chorusy to listen to. Square is a perfect 50/50 wave, and then you get different pulse widths. As the Fantoms don't actually generate oscillators, instead you get recorded samples of different pulse widths, on any other synth, this would be a knob. The samples we get are something like 10 25 30 45 and 50, 50 being a square. The lower (or higher, but they're the essentially the same as lower, because 50 is a center point) the sharper the sound becomes. Look up pictures of pulse widths to understand this!
Detuning these waves gives you a very glassy sound, you can make some beautiful pads with it.
Triangle - This sound has a very low frequency, it's not very strong in the high ends, but does have some buzz to it. there's not really a lot to say about it, it's quite a good sound for boosting the low end in pads and leads. Also good for high pass filtering with lots of resonance to make some interesting fundamentals in pads.
Sine - This wave is a perfect oscillation, it's a completely natural tone with no odd fundamentals. Used a lot in the way of hiphop and rap leads. Manipulating this wave can prove tricky, because a lot of it is unaffected by many filters etc.
As for tips in learning to use these sounds and identify them, you really just need to make an initialized patch, and select the waves one at a time, one layer and just see what you can do with them, really go crazy! After you've really gotten your teeth into what you can do with one tone, take a second, and start doing things to that, see what you end up with. See how the waves react to one another.
After that, you'll be listening to music and start thinking, hey, I made that sound when I did that to this!
Maybe try writing down your findings with different sounds, so you can reference them. EG - Square, very strong peaks when resonance turned up. Etc!
Hope this helps you
