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"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.

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

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?!

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?

Here's an article on how to program the DX7 that might help: https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/dx7/manuals/pr...

This guy explains the process of creating a basic bass sound quite well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XbrTC0NndM

I've just started getting interested in FM and DX7. Power DX7 has some good insight. Here he is talking about algorithm choice and how it can affect sound. https://youtu.be/s4oMnCCUb8w

I have never seen a tutorial. I've scoured a lot of forums, and read about how the team at Yamaha made the original presets. Most people never bother to design sounds. It's more tedious and frustrating than subtractive synth sounds.

First step is finding a capable FM synth you like with a decent user interface. Dexed, NI FM8, Arturia DX7 V, or maybe even Reaktor. (Edit: It’s obvious to me that you shouldn’t buy a Yamaha DX-something to do sound design, but just to make it clear, don’t do that. The user interface is abominable. Just get Dexed if you don’t know what you want.)

Build your sound up by adding "partials" or "tones", or whatever you want to call them. Start with two operators, with one chained to the next. Explore the space of ratios (start with 1:1) and modulation levels. Once you get a handle on some part of the sonic space, consider adding a third operator at the back, i.e. if your operators are A -> B -> C, and C is the output, then A is the one you're adding. Experiment with ratios and modulation levels, and consider this a way to expand the space you've already explored.

You'll find that most of the modulation values are either too subtle to notice or noise that you just can't stand. If you're at a point where the middle ground between subtlety and noise doesn't have the sound you want, that's when you might add the third operator.

With these partials, you can build up the sustain and attack of your sound separately. Experiment with using different timing for all of the envelopes.

You can tell that a lot of sounds are made from a smaller set of partials that have been recombined. For example, the classic DX7 rhodes sound is made up of an attack and sustain partial, and these partials have been reused and recombined with tons of other partials to make sound variations.

This is why I'm not fond of the DX-11, Ad Lib, or other 4-operator systems. They have the "FM sound" but you're really quite limited building your sounds. If you have a partial made with three operators, and you want to add something to it, you have to share operators or use a pure sine wave.

I live those 4op FM synths. The TX81z is awesome. The newer Digitone from the Swedish company, Elektron is a also fabulous.

The TX81Z was super fun and versatile. But the sound was quite tinny.

It depends, but I get what you mean. I love all the basses a plucky sounds I can get with that synth. also doesn't need a lot of post processing to cut through the mix.

While 6-op definitely gives you more flexibility than 4-op, I find 4-op with non-sine operators more than usable. Examples include the YMF262 (OPL3), TX81Z and of course the digitone.

I find it the limitations too frustrating and I do not like the sound palette.

Korg Opsix has a pretty nice UI for FM: https://www.musicradar.com/reviews/korg-opsix

I've seen a fair number of people say that by using it they were finally getting the hang of FM.

“The Complete DX7” by Howard Massey was considered the gold standard back in the day. It’s on archive.org[0]. I recommend using it with Dexed, the open source DX7 emulator[1] (unless you have a DX7 handy). There’s a lot of detail about pressing buttons on the unit, but if you can get past that, it does a pretty good job of showing how to make the types of sounds you want.

[0] https://archive.org/details/thecompletedx7 [1] https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/

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.

An Fs1r second hand are outrageously expensive now :(.

> 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/.

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.

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

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”

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.

Ableton Live is an incredible piece of software, the people who make it deserve to be paid.

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.

Or FLStudio and spend some time with Sytrus. Or pick up a copy of FM8

What do you mean? That's awesome!

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)