5 ms·

Reading this really drove home to me just how amusing some of the twists and turns of music tech development are. In contemporary modular synth formats, you now

by rotexo 5y ago

Reading this really drove home to me just how amusing some of the twists and turns of music tech development are. In contemporary modular synth formats, you now have modules that use similar FM tone chips, but are controlled by potentiometers and analog control voltage inputs (for instance, https://busycircuits.com/alm011/ https://busycircuits.com/alm011/). I could see how someone could conclude that this destroys the reproducibility advantages of digital FM synthesis, while preserving the cheesiness of FM sounds. From another perspective, you can freely explore the enormous landscape of sound produced by FM synthesis, without diving into the deep end of DX7 programming. Instead of generating sysex dumps on the fly to dynamically change the sounds produced by the synth, you just feed whatever control voltage you can come up with into the inputs of a module and bask in the insanity that comes out (for instance—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-YEbg040ww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-YEbg040ww definitely not everyone’s cup of tea). Edit: but if you want to explore the landscape of FM tones generated by these chips without spending all of your money on a modular setup, generating sysex messages will of course take you where you want to go: https://fo.am/activities/midimutant/ https://fo.am/activities/midimutant/

djmips 5y ago
What do you mean? That's awesome!
- rotexo 5y ago
  Oh I definitely think it is too! I could see other people dismissing the modular stuff as a waste of money, or the midimutant thing as a- or un-musical. Maybe I could have reframed this as a meditation on how quirky technology development can be when it is subservient to human creative urges. (Edit: spell check)
klodolph 5y ago
"Basking in the insanity" just about sums it up. It's remarkably difficult to craft a good sound with FM synthesis (or phase modulation, for the pedants). My experience with FM sound design tells me that 2 operators is quite primitive, 3 operators opens up a larger set of non-insane possibilities, and 6 operators (like the DX 7) is, surprisingly, the minimum I would personally want to use for FM synthesis! So if you are going to go 100% FM, and you're going the eurorack route, I'd personally want nothing short of two ALM011s. You obviously don't need two if you're mixing it with other modules, it's just that if you want to do FM synthesis, four operators is surprisingly limiting.
- rotexo 5y ago
  Oh for sure. An additional advantage of the modular approach is: if you don’t like the raw FM tone, you can try running it through an MS-20 filter, or a Moog filter, or a wavefolder, or a ring modulator, or… One of my favorite custom SuperCollider synths that I wrote was a simple 2-op phase modulation generator run through a wavefolder and filter. I probably could have arrived at a similar sound with more operators, but it wouldn’t have felt as intuitive to write! Edit: these darn mobile keyboards
  - 8bitsrule 5y ago
    When Garageband got some FM synths, I was pleasantly surprised by them ... the first FM that didn't immediately need an EQ. (Talented staff then.) I started reading the article without noting the author's name. When I got through 2/3 of it, the thought was who the hell is this?. After seeing the name, it was of course, who else?!
- gilmore606 5y ago
  What is your thought process when doing sound design with FM? I've been doing this for years and while I can easily wrap my head around subtractive synths and go from sound-in-head to sound-on-tape pretty well, FM is just impenetrable to me. Are there any good tutorials on how to approach this?
  - kens 5y ago
    Here's an article on how to program the DX7 that might help: https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/dx7/manuals/prgrmdx7.pdf https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/dx7/manuals/pr...
  - smnc 5y ago
    This guy explains the process of creating a basic bass sound quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XbrTC0NndM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XbrTC0NndM
  - martyvis 5y ago
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
FM was always possible with analog, but it sounded like a mess because you need digital stability to make consistent sounds. Tiny frequency variations that add drift to analog sounds and make them interesting will completely destroy an analog FM patch and turn into unplayable noise. If you really want to explore FM you can write your own code and create algorithms with as many carriers/oscillators as you like. This turns out to be less interesting than it might be, although if you use a lot of carrier/modulator pairs you get a kind of spicy variation on additive. It gets much more interesting when you add formants and other variations like the later FS1R synth did. If you want to keep the modular approach the various digital modulars - Reaktor, VCV Rack, Voltage Modular, etc - give you clean FM with patch cords.
- weatherlight 5y ago
  An Fs1r second hand are outrageously expensive now :(.
tomc1985 5y ago
Can't you explore the depths of FM synthesis just as easily if not more with a good VST plugin?
- weatherlight 5y ago
  Yes. Get a free version of ableton and go play with the operator synth. There also a huge amount of tutorials for that particular “soft synth”
  - ace2358 5y ago
    Pro tip: You can continually sign up for trial versions of the full suite for 90 days. At the end of the 90 days you sign up with another email and a new free trail. I’ve heard of a few produces that have done this for many many years.
    - regularjack 5y ago
      Ableton Live is an incredible piece of software, the people who make it deserve to be paid.
      - ace2358 5y ago
        Honestly it’s an average piece of software that has bugs and crashes on the hourly. Live 11 has been a massive regression in terms of speed and stability. It’s original mission statement of being a great hybrid live performance and studio production software has kind of failed. The instability makes it scary to use live and the performance issues makes it frustrating in the studio. (I guess each producer has a different use case. If you’re DJing with ableton using audio tracks in sessions view it’s stability is okay! But doing large live sets with hundreds of tracks and I start getting nervous.) That’s not even talking about the lacklustre update that was live 11 especially for the price. It’s obviously been on a downward trend for years given that Bitwig came out from some of the original founders. I’m not condoning stealing. Actually the opposite. I’m encouraging people to try the free trial instead of pirating. Pirating software can be dangerous and have added malware. Ableton give out a free trial, use it and decide if you think it’s worth the money.
bartread 5y ago
> From another perspective, you can freely explore the enormous landscape of sound produced by FM synthesis, without diving into the deep end of DX7 programming. You can get some of this with Dexed as well: https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/ https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/. It's basically an emulation of a DX7 that allows you to create patches without the horrendous menu-diving interface of a real DX7, and you can also use it to export and import patches to and from the real hardware over MIDI. There is something quite fun about using a modern computer to hook up to a 1983 synth and having it "just work", despite the flaws in the DX7's MIDI implementation. I've had a harder time getting printers set up in the past. Dexed's a useful tool for experimenting with and learning about FM synthesis (and I'm still very much at the "everything I do sounds terrible" phase, unless I go the route of modifying an existing patch), but I'm not sure you can automate it, which would give you the evolving sounds of something like MidiMutant. I also tend to be of the opinion that a good analogue filter (or an emulated analogue filter - I'm not that much of a purist), can really open up the usefulness of an FM synth.

by rotexo 5y ago

djmips 5y ago

What do you mean? That's awesome!

rotexo 5y ago
Oh I definitely think it is too! I could see other people dismissing the modular stuff as a waste of money, or the midimutant thing as a- or un-musical. Maybe I could have reframed this as a meditation on how quirky technology development can be when it is subservient to human creative urges. (Edit: spell check)

klodolph 5y ago

"Basking in the insanity" just about sums it up. It's remarkably difficult to craft a good sound with FM synthesis (or phase modulation, for the pedants). My experience with FM sound design tells me that 2 operators is quite primitive, 3 operators opens up a larger set of non-insane possibilities, and 6 operators (like the DX 7) is, surprisingly, the minimum I would personally want to use for FM synthesis! So if you are going to go 100% FM, and you're going the eurorack route, I'd personally want nothing short of two ALM011s. You obviously don't need two if you're mixing it with other modules, it's just that if you want to do FM synthesis, four operators is surprisingly limiting.

rotexo 5y ago
Oh for sure. An additional advantage of the modular approach is: if you don’t like the raw FM tone, you can try running it through an MS-20 filter, or a Moog filter, or a wavefolder, or a ring modulator, or… One of my favorite custom SuperCollider synths that I wrote was a simple 2-op phase modulation generator run through a wavefolder and filter. I probably could have arrived at a similar sound with more operators, but it wouldn’t have felt as intuitive to write! Edit: these darn mobile keyboards
- 8bitsrule 5y ago
  When Garageband got some FM synths, I was pleasantly surprised by them ... the first FM that didn't immediately need an EQ. (Talented staff then.) I started reading the article without noting the author's name. When I got through 2/3 of it, the thought was who the hell is this?. After seeing the name, it was of course, who else?!
gilmore606 5y ago
What is your thought process when doing sound design with FM? I've been doing this for years and while I can easily wrap my head around subtractive synths and go from sound-in-head to sound-on-tape pretty well, FM is just impenetrable to me. Are there any good tutorials on how to approach this?
- kens 5y ago
  Here's an article on how to program the DX7 that might help: https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/dx7/manuals/prgrmdx7.pdf https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/dx7/manuals/pr...
- smnc 5y ago
  This guy explains the process of creating a basic bass sound quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XbrTC0NndM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XbrTC0NndM
- martyvis 5y ago

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

FM was always possible with analog, but it sounded like a mess because you need digital stability to make consistent sounds. Tiny frequency variations that add drift to analog sounds and make them interesting will completely destroy an analog FM patch and turn into unplayable noise. If you really want to explore FM you can write your own code and create algorithms with as many carriers/oscillators as you like. This turns out to be less interesting than it might be, although if you use a lot of carrier/modulator pairs you get a kind of spicy variation on additive. It gets much more interesting when you add formants and other variations like the later FS1R synth did. If you want to keep the modular approach the various digital modulars - Reaktor, VCV Rack, Voltage Modular, etc - give you clean FM with patch cords.

weatherlight 5y ago
An Fs1r second hand are outrageously expensive now :(.

tomc1985 5y ago

Can't you explore the depths of FM synthesis just as easily if not more with a good VST plugin?

weatherlight 5y ago
Yes. Get a free version of ableton and go play with the operator synth. There also a huge amount of tutorials for that particular “soft synth”
- ace2358 5y ago
  Pro tip: You can continually sign up for trial versions of the full suite for 90 days. At the end of the 90 days you sign up with another email and a new free trail. I’ve heard of a few produces that have done this for many many years.
  - regularjack 5y ago
    Ableton Live is an incredible piece of software, the people who make it deserve to be paid.
    - ace2358 5y ago
      Honestly it’s an average piece of software that has bugs and crashes on the hourly. Live 11 has been a massive regression in terms of speed and stability. It’s original mission statement of being a great hybrid live performance and studio production software has kind of failed. The instability makes it scary to use live and the performance issues makes it frustrating in the studio. (I guess each producer has a different use case. If you’re DJing with ableton using audio tracks in sessions view it’s stability is okay! But doing large live sets with hundreds of tracks and I start getting nervous.) That’s not even talking about the lacklustre update that was live 11 especially for the price. It’s obviously been on a downward trend for years given that Bitwig came out from some of the original founders. I’m not condoning stealing. Actually the opposite. I’m encouraging people to try the free trial instead of pirating. Pirating software can be dangerous and have added malware. Ableton give out a free trial, use it and decide if you think it’s worth the money.

bartread 5y ago

> From another perspective, you can freely explore the enormous landscape of sound produced by FM synthesis, without diving into the deep end of DX7 programming. You can get some of this with Dexed as well: https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/ https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/. It's basically an emulation of a DX7 that allows you to create patches without the horrendous menu-diving interface of a real DX7, and you can also use it to export and import patches to and from the real hardware over MIDI. There is something quite fun about using a modern computer to hook up to a 1983 synth and having it "just work", despite the flaws in the DX7's MIDI implementation. I've had a harder time getting printers set up in the past. Dexed's a useful tool for experimenting with and learning about FM synthesis (and I'm still very much at the "everything I do sounds terrible" phase, unless I go the route of modifying an existing patch), but I'm not sure you can automate it, which would give you the evolving sounds of something like MidiMutant. I also tend to be of the opinion that a good analogue filter (or an emulated analogue filter - I'm not that much of a purist), can really open up the usefulness of an FM synth.