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Learn sound theory with an acclaimed synth company

sfree.life

167 pointsjantomes25 comments

I had a dx7 in college. Its an FM synth, an from the little diagrams on the top, it was fascinating. I could make my own sounds, but I never could get the time to get programming (beyond detuning the sound and doubling it to make a "fatter" sound, the dx7 had a gray matter mod chip). Lamentably in the 90s information about this stuff was harder to come by, plus the 2 line led screen to input things wasn't ideal.

You can see the top of the keyboard images here: https://soundprogramming.net/synthesizers/yamaha/yamaha-dx7/

But the internet abounds with sound making tools!

ableton has a synth basics online class/demo kind of thing:

https://learningsynths.ableton.com

visual programing sound machines in pd

http://www.pd-tutorial.com/english/index.html

Also the GDC talk by the sound designer of doom (the new one). He's using sine wave, and a bunch of effects boxes (some in parallel) to generate all those sounds. There is also a sound morph tool they used to combine sounds with a chainsaw sound... The talk starts a couple minutes in after a doom sound trailer thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FNBMZsqrY

> ableton has a synth basics online class/demo kind of thing

This course is really good and fun! It made me appreciate the synth.

Dx7 is such a rad synth!! I had a few vintage synths when I lived in New York but sold them due to space. Just started getting back into it and there is some really cooo hardware out there. Especially digging the Elektron line right now. Picked up a Digitakt which is a funky sampler / drum machine / sequencer. Has allowed me to drive my synths via midi without using software or a laptop. Very refreshing and a totally different workflow.

You aren't alone. Almost no one could figure out how to program the DX7. Even today with the resurgence of FM (Digitone, FM8, Volca FM, etc.), it's still just a really unintuitive way to build sounds.

That's not to say it's a bad, or powerful way, it's just really hard to build a correct mental model of how changing parameter X will affect the sound in the way you want.

Aphex Twin figured out how to program his:

https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/aphex-twin-midimutant

wow..

That is a good use of a pi. Though the button labels are a little odd (given that its a genetic algorithm..)

I can't tell if that's an argument in favor or against my claim. :)

If you have to have a brain like Richard D. James to grasp it, what hope is there for us?

ALM makes some eurorack modules that are fun to use and sound great. This one provides 4 operator digital FM using ‘new-old-stock’ Yamaha ICs:

https://busycircuits.com/alm011/

I was something of a synth expert in the 80s. Built my own analog synths using Paia kits, used giant wall-sized modulars with rats nests of patch cords, programmed Arps, owned a few Korgs. Later I learned the Fairlight, hooked two of its channels up to galvos and did laser shows with it.

But I could never figure out the DX7.

>Later I learned the Fairlight, hooked two of its channels up to galvos and did laser shows with it.

That seems neat. I did some poking around about how that could work.. Oscilloscope music. fun.

There is a new, very nice sounding open hardware FM synth running on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA chip that I really want to build (by René Ceballos, creator of z3ta+) - https://www.futur3soundz.com/

But yes - it has 400 parameters, programming the sounds isn't going to be easy!

I wonder if you could use a neural network to map many parameters into a reduced set of useful controls. Advanced physical modelling synths can have the same issue - too many parameters to meaningfully control while playing.

I'm vaguely remembering a talk I saw at Microsoft Research in 2013 by someone who studies psychoacoustics at a university I can't recall. They created an acoustic model that predicted certain qualities of a sound (wetness, harshness, brilliance, etc.), trained with data where subjects assigned such qualities on a scale for many example sounds. They used this to create 2D synth controls using the salient parameters. I believe this ended up being a somewhat popular VST plugin.

I am a huge fan of FM synthesis; it's wonderful for making growling bass sounds as well as drum/wood/metallic sounds as well as keyboard, brass, harp/guitar and string sounds and bizarre screaming out-of-tune noises. And of course the (in)famous DX7 "piano" sound.

If you want to keep it simple you can use it similarly to subtractive synthesis - instead of using a lowpass filter you can just reduce (or increase) the amount of FM on a single carrier oscillator.

I had never owned a hardware FM synth (though I was intrigued by the Volca FM) but after making many dozens of sounds on iOS FM synths I actually bought a vintage Yamaha TX81Z for cheap on eBay just so I could have fun with a hardware instrument. It's Yamaha's simpler 4-op design (with extra waveforms to compensate) and it's a fantastic instrument if either a) you can deal with the tiny display or b) you program it over MIDI using an external editor program. I think it was designed as a rack ensemble of sorts as it is 8-voice multitimbral. It also came with a cassette tape (!) containing the sysex data for its factory patches. ;-)

For anyone who wants to try out a free/open source DX7-like software instrument, you may want to check out Dexed: https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/

Julius O. Smith's online books about audio signal processing: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/

Tangentially

https://forum.bela.io/d/1277-c-real-time-audio-programming-w...

>we just released a course on C++ Real-Time Audio Programming with Bela. This is aimed at beginner to intermediate C++ users, so if you have so far been using Bela with other languages and you are interested in tipping you toes in C++, this is a great occasion. If you know your C++ stuff, you may still want to check out some of the more advanced topics (ARM/NEON assembly, state machines, fixed-point maths, timing, block-based processing).

For anyone interested in this kind of thing, definitely check out Syntorial[1]. If you want to tune your ear, it's quite helpful. Also, if you're interested in modular synths, you can tinker with VCV Rack[2] and virtually patch modules. It's a great learning environment, and won't break your bank like a modular synth habit will. Take it from me. ;)

[1] https://www.syntorial.com/

[2] https://vcvrack.com/

Harmony Explained: Progress Towards A Scientific Theory of Music

https://arxiv.org/html/1202.4212

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12085844

This is really interesting (I remember reading it years ago), but does not, in fact, explain harmony. There is no explanation of why particular harmonies work that generalizes, nor any methods given for calculating harmonies de novo.

That article is one of the most deeply disappointing to me - even as a composer who doesn't like traditional music theory. It starts with some criticism of traditional music theory I agree with, then goes and... reconstructs several aspects of traditional music theory anyway. Also has a common case of worship of the harmonic series but then conveniently stopping at stuff like 7:4, 7:5, and 7:6 ratios.

I don’t agree. It doesn’t try to refute traditional music theory, but explain why it works.

This site has been owned. Got a nasty popup on click

Edit: no longer appearing

Huh. I didn't see the popup.

Bastl Instruments is a really cool company. I've build 6 or 7 of their kits, super fun stuff with great docs and great sound.

Here's a link to the YouTube lecture just in case:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow2ZmBmDaNo

Didn't get any popup either, guess they'd resolved the problem.

Maybe it's only triggered intermittently? Last week I found a site that when I visited, it directed me to one of those "you've made the 5 billionth search! claim your prize" pages. After reloading a few more times, I was able to get to the actual website.

I just tried visiting the site again, and was able to reproduce this issue. Looks like it's a Drupal 7 site.

I was alarmed because I've seen this kind of behavior on malware infested computers, but I'm running linux and I double-checked my browser extension and proxy settings. Haven't seen this behavior on any other site.

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