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I have spent a few months this year trying to wrap my head around FM synthesis. Unfortunately I don’t think the DX7 is hard to program just because of the user

I have spent a few months this year trying to wrap my head around FM synthesis. Unfortunately I don’t think the DX7 is hard to program just because of the user interface. I have read up and thoroughly understand the theory behind FM synthesis. I have followed various tutorials to design patches. At the end of the the day FM synthesis is powerful but it is inherently much less intuitive and also much easier to get horrible ugly sounds out of than something like the subtractive synthesis seen on most analogue synths. The reason FM synths need to be digital is that very precise pitch ratios between oscillators are important in order to get good sounds. For example you may want to modulate the pitch of one oscillator with another exactly a fifth up (3 to 2 frequency ratio). It can easily sound terrible if the fifth up oscillator goes slightly out of tune. These sort of precision and nonlinearity in output are also one thing that makes FM synthesis a lot harder to use.

sramsay 7y ago
> Unfortunately I don’t think the DX7 is hard to program just because of the user interface. That was my first thought. And actually, I kept trying to understand (from the article) how exactly this UI makes FM programming easier. Does it? Or is that not the point? Because one of my "sound designer dreams" is being able to get the sound in my head coming out of the machine using FM. I can do that with regular subtractive synthesis (more or less) but with FM, I feel like I'm twiddling knobs until I like the way it sounds. And that's with a really good interface!
- mntmoss 7y ago
  I think the trick to getting FM into a better UX would be to apply more computation to it to identify ahead of time which parameters and ranges will produce dramatic variation from a given starting point, and so reduce the programming to a model where you aren't repeatedly searching for where sweet spots are, but rather quickly paging into the zone desired and then adding minor adjustments. However part of the challenge of this would be in covering numerous combinations and identifying places where two or more parameters need to be changed simultaneously. Still basically a problem governed by combinatorial constraints.
whenchamenia 7y ago
The same can be true of analog. The 'legendary' synths were such because they limited you to the nicer parts of the range. Similarly, the lighter weight yamaha synths do too. Check out a pss-470 or similar and then the challenge is to get weird. The interface is truly the insturment.

sramsay 7y ago

> Unfortunately I don’t think the DX7 is hard to program just because of the user interface. That was my first thought. And actually, I kept trying to understand (from the article) how exactly this UI makes FM programming easier. Does it? Or is that not the point? Because one of my "sound designer dreams" is being able to get the sound in my head coming out of the machine using FM. I can do that with regular subtractive synthesis (more or less) but with FM, I feel like I'm twiddling knobs until I like the way it sounds. And that's with a really good interface!

mntmoss 7y ago
I think the trick to getting FM into a better UX would be to apply more computation to it to identify ahead of time which parameters and ranges will produce dramatic variation from a given starting point, and so reduce the programming to a model where you aren't repeatedly searching for where sweet spots are, but rather quickly paging into the zone desired and then adding minor adjustments. However part of the challenge of this would be in covering numerous combinations and identifying places where two or more parameters need to be changed simultaneously. Still basically a problem governed by combinatorial constraints.

whenchamenia 7y ago

The same can be true of analog. The 'legendary' synths were such because they limited you to the nicer parts of the range. Similarly, the lighter weight yamaha synths do too. Check out a pss-470 or similar and then the challenge is to get weird. The interface is truly the insturment.