7 ms·

Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live

188 points by gregsadetsky 2y ago

bowsamic 2y ago
I love FM synthesis and I love Robert Henke. Great article
- polotics 2y ago
  Had the good luck of attending an Henke (Monolake) concert in large-ish and cubical space fully rigged with speaker arrays doing wave-field-synthesis which was beyond anything I heard before or since. Loud is one thing, gigantic is something else. https://roberthenke.com/concerts/wfs.html https://roberthenke.com/concerts/wfs.html
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    You should have stepped over to the TU Berlin. A few month's before that concert, there was a performance/recreation of a concert that took place in Koln cathedral of various Messiaen organ works, played back on the WFS system installed at the TU. Much, much bigger than Henke's setup at Tresor, and it was a truly remarkable experience.
  - Nabi 2y ago
    About a decade ago had the luck attending in-person his field recording and granular synthesis workshop in Amsterdam. Such an inspiring and humble individual! Still coming back from time to time to his timeless album Monolake - Hongkong.
chubs 2y ago
Oh I love FM synths! I'm working on a customisable one in my spare time lately for the kids' school, as the music teacher was complaining that the students have been using all the same samples over and over. Feel free to have a peek! Desktop only. Source code is hopefully nice and clean too: https://chrishulbert.github.io/you-synth https://chrishulbert.github.io/you-synth
- 127 2y ago
  Super cool. Well done. Now make it a full Yamaha ReFace DX ;) Also woaah, the randomize is amazing. Proposal: make z and x change octave.
dokka 2y ago
Ah Operator. This synth is so deep. Not only is it a fantastic FM synth, but it does subtractive synthesis well too. Also, it really is impressive how the UI manages to fit all those parameters. I mostly use it for cool synth leads. Here's one of my favorite videos on Operator https://youtu.be/rfeY0_k1ctk?si=s68Lr033cHf34a4M https://youtu.be/rfeY0_k1ctk?si=s68Lr033cHf34a4M by Robert Henke himself.
- shermanyo 2y ago
  It's my goto VA synth too. I'll reach for it first, before Analog or other VSTs.
meindnoch 2y ago
Fyi Robert Henke's new album came out a few weeks ago: https://roberthenke.bandcamp.com/album/studio https://roberthenke.bandcamp.com/album/studio
bambax 2y ago
Reason has a very nice and versatile FM synth, "Algoritm": https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack-extension/algoritm-fm-synthesizer/ https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack-extension/algoritm-f... Ableton tutorial features an excellent (and completely free) FM synth in-browser: https://learningsynths.ableton.com/en/playground https://learningsynths.ableton.com/en/playground
fuhsnn 2y ago
FM is one of the most "naturally digital" synthesis method to implement, it's trivial once you have an accumulator and sin table working. The simplest form (and arguably the easiest to sound musical), can be expressed with a one-liner formula: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/fjp9psrcqb https://www.desmos.com/calculator/fjp9psrcqb
yungporko 2y ago
somebody please make a plugin version of operator for both windows and mac, there are zero good options for fm synth plugins in 2024 except for sytrus on windows if they even still sell it. exacoustics GHOST is looking very promising though, just still in its teething stages
- S0y 2y ago
  Is Dexed not good? https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/ https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    Dexed is good but it's primarily a DX7 including all the weird preset algorithm choices and that's not really necessary if you aren't using DX7 presets. It's a DX7 emulator, not really jsut an FM synth for its own sake like Operator is
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  there are numerous good FM modules inside VCV Rack (and Cardinal), which have the benefit (or drawback) that you get full control over both upstream modulation and downstream processing. And they exist for all platforms that Rack (& Cardinal) run on, not just "windows and mac".
  - sramsay 2y ago
    Hear, hear! I absolutely love FM-OP from Bogaudio. In fact, I'd say I use that more than any other FM softsynth mentioned in this thread.
- johnofthesea 2y ago
  Probably not pure FM synth, but what about Aalto from Madrona Labs?
  - MDJMediaLab 2y ago
    Aalto is great. It's more of a west-coast style Buchla complex oscillator clone than a traditional FM synth with multiple operators, but complex oscillators have at least one carrier and one modulator by design. I use very few software synthesizers but Aalto and Operator are two of my favorites.
1zael 2y ago
Ableton is an epitome of software design innovation. I think few people understand how groundbreaking the Session View vs Arrangement View design was to advance the workflow of both produced and live music. Subcomponents like Operator created design patterns that are widely adopted by most VSTs today. Kudos to the Ableton team for crafting a product that is so beloved.
- pottering 2y ago
  Not only Session View, but also its absence of effing toolbars, wish people realized how genius that is.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Not just groundbreaking, but zeitgeist shaping. Session View (aka "clip launching") represents more than just a workflow - it represents an idea of what music is. Some people might want to spend their time arguing over whether or how much or when that idea is correct. I'd prefer to note that in the 25 or so years since its debut, the idea has reshaped so much contemporary music whether it is correct or not. The idea that you build up music out of sections that potentially repeat, then move on to another section ... it all seems so obvious to us techno-centric geeks. It actually isn't how most of the world has traditionally conceived of music, but the language that has been traditionally used has often had a structure that has made it easy to strip out the complexities, and the result is ... Ableton Live's Session View.
  - BodyCulture 2y ago
    And it is stable, this always shocked me when I tried out some other software for music production that it actually crashed and killed my project! You will not have that bad experience with Ableton!
    - mb7733 2y ago
      Part of what drives that is that Ableton is designed to be used in-performance, so even minor instability isn't acceptable at all
tech_ken 2y ago
If you're interested in the qualitative distinction between subtractive and additive synthesis this is a fun practical example of why you might use the latter that I like a lot (implemented in operator no less :) ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYVsS_X17bM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYVsS_X17bM
Carrok 2y ago
I always tell new Ableton users to make one practice track using only Operator for every sound. It’s very educational and surprisingly for the new users, effective.
milabogdanova 2y ago
[dead]
mroc 2y ago
Guy here, who programmed the C++ implementation of Operator: It was a pleasure to build the instrument together with Robert, and I learned a ton from him. In the 2009 upgrade I replaced the aliasing wavetables with bandlimited ones, generated using IFFT, one per octave. With 2x oversampling, it became aliasing-free as long as you didn’t use FM. When adding the IFFT, the feature of drawing harmonics also became obvious. Fun fact: The four oscillators were calculated in parallel using SSE intrinsics. It’s the only time I’ve ever been able to improve the performance of something using that particular technology. For me personally, Operator is a pinnacle of my engineering career - It is one of the most-used synthesizers in the world, though of course, there are much better ones out there.

188 points by gregsadetsky 2y ago

bowsamic 2y ago

I love FM synthesis and I love Robert Henke. Great article

polotics 2y ago
Had the good luck of attending an Henke (Monolake) concert in large-ish and cubical space fully rigged with speaker arrays doing wave-field-synthesis which was beyond anything I heard before or since. Loud is one thing, gigantic is something else. https://roberthenke.com/concerts/wfs.html https://roberthenke.com/concerts/wfs.html
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  You should have stepped over to the TU Berlin. A few month's before that concert, there was a performance/recreation of a concert that took place in Koln cathedral of various Messiaen organ works, played back on the WFS system installed at the TU. Much, much bigger than Henke's setup at Tresor, and it was a truly remarkable experience.
- Nabi 2y ago
  About a decade ago had the luck attending in-person his field recording and granular synthesis workshop in Amsterdam. Such an inspiring and humble individual! Still coming back from time to time to his timeless album Monolake - Hongkong.

chubs 2y ago

Oh I love FM synths! I'm working on a customisable one in my spare time lately for the kids' school, as the music teacher was complaining that the students have been using all the same samples over and over. Feel free to have a peek! Desktop only. Source code is hopefully nice and clean too: https://chrishulbert.github.io/you-synth https://chrishulbert.github.io/you-synth

127 2y ago
Super cool. Well done. Now make it a full Yamaha ReFace DX ;) Also woaah, the randomize is amazing. Proposal: make z and x change octave.

dokka 2y ago

Ah Operator. This synth is so deep. Not only is it a fantastic FM synth, but it does subtractive synthesis well too. Also, it really is impressive how the UI manages to fit all those parameters. I mostly use it for cool synth leads. Here's one of my favorite videos on Operator https://youtu.be/rfeY0_k1ctk?si=s68Lr033cHf34a4M https://youtu.be/rfeY0_k1ctk?si=s68Lr033cHf34a4M by Robert Henke himself.

shermanyo 2y ago
It's my goto VA synth too. I'll reach for it first, before Analog or other VSTs.

meindnoch 2y ago

Fyi Robert Henke's new album came out a few weeks ago: https://roberthenke.bandcamp.com/album/studio https://roberthenke.bandcamp.com/album/studio

bambax 2y ago

Reason has a very nice and versatile FM synth, "Algoritm": https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack-extension/algoritm-fm-synthesizer/ https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack-extension/algoritm-f... Ableton tutorial features an excellent (and completely free) FM synth in-browser: https://learningsynths.ableton.com/en/playground https://learningsynths.ableton.com/en/playground

fuhsnn 2y ago

FM is one of the most "naturally digital" synthesis method to implement, it's trivial once you have an accumulator and sin table working. The simplest form (and arguably the easiest to sound musical), can be expressed with a one-liner formula: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/fjp9psrcqb https://www.desmos.com/calculator/fjp9psrcqb

yungporko 2y ago

somebody please make a plugin version of operator for both windows and mac, there are zero good options for fm synth plugins in 2024 except for sytrus on windows if they even still sell it. exacoustics GHOST is looking very promising though, just still in its teething stages

S0y 2y ago
Is Dexed not good? https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/ https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/
- bowsamic 2y ago
  Dexed is good but it's primarily a DX7 including all the weird preset algorithm choices and that's not really necessary if you aren't using DX7 presets. It's a DX7 emulator, not really jsut an FM synth for its own sake like Operator is
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
there are numerous good FM modules inside VCV Rack (and Cardinal), which have the benefit (or drawback) that you get full control over both upstream modulation and downstream processing. And they exist for all platforms that Rack (& Cardinal) run on, not just "windows and mac".
- sramsay 2y ago
  Hear, hear! I absolutely love FM-OP from Bogaudio. In fact, I'd say I use that more than any other FM softsynth mentioned in this thread.
johnofthesea 2y ago
Probably not pure FM synth, but what about Aalto from Madrona Labs?
- MDJMediaLab 2y ago
  Aalto is great. It's more of a west-coast style Buchla complex oscillator clone than a traditional FM synth with multiple operators, but complex oscillators have at least one carrier and one modulator by design. I use very few software synthesizers but Aalto and Operator are two of my favorites.

1zael 2y ago

Ableton is an epitome of software design innovation. I think few people understand how groundbreaking the Session View vs Arrangement View design was to advance the workflow of both produced and live music. Subcomponents like Operator created design patterns that are widely adopted by most VSTs today. Kudos to the Ableton team for crafting a product that is so beloved.

pottering 2y ago
Not only Session View, but also its absence of effing toolbars, wish people realized how genius that is.
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
Not just groundbreaking, but zeitgeist shaping. Session View (aka "clip launching") represents more than just a workflow - it represents an idea of what music is. Some people might want to spend their time arguing over whether or how much or when that idea is correct. I'd prefer to note that in the 25 or so years since its debut, the idea has reshaped so much contemporary music whether it is correct or not. The idea that you build up music out of sections that potentially repeat, then move on to another section ... it all seems so obvious to us techno-centric geeks. It actually isn't how most of the world has traditionally conceived of music, but the language that has been traditionally used has often had a structure that has made it easy to strip out the complexities, and the result is ... Ableton Live's Session View.
- BodyCulture 2y ago
  And it is stable, this always shocked me when I tried out some other software for music production that it actually crashed and killed my project! You will not have that bad experience with Ableton!
  - mb7733 2y ago
    Part of what drives that is that Ableton is designed to be used in-performance, so even minor instability isn't acceptable at all

tech_ken 2y ago

If you're interested in the qualitative distinction between subtractive and additive synthesis this is a fun practical example of why you might use the latter that I like a lot (implemented in operator no less :) ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYVsS_X17bM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYVsS_X17bM

Carrok 2y ago

I always tell new Ableton users to make one practice track using only Operator for every sound. It’s very educational and surprisingly for the new users, effective.

milabogdanova 2y ago

[dead]

mroc 2y ago

Guy here, who programmed the C++ implementation of Operator: It was a pleasure to build the instrument together with Robert, and I learned a ton from him. In the 2009 upgrade I replaced the aliasing wavetables with bandlimited ones, generated using IFFT, one per octave. With 2x oversampling, it became aliasing-free as long as you didn’t use FM. When adding the IFFT, the feature of drawing harmonics also became obvious. Fun fact: The four oscillators were calculated in parallel using SSE intrinsics. It’s the only time I’ve ever been able to improve the performance of something using that particular technology. For me personally, Operator is a pinnacle of my engineering career - It is one of the most-used synthesizers in the world, though of course, there are much better ones out there.