Explore the space of ratios (start with 1:1) and modulation levels. Start with two operators, with one chained to the next. Just get Dexed if you don’t know what you want.)īuild your sound up by adding 'partials' or 'tones', or whatever you want to call them. (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. Dexed, NI FM8, Arturia DX7 V, or maybe even Reaktor. It's more tedious and frustrating than subtractive synth sounds.įirst step is finding a capable FM synth you like with a decent user interface. Most people never bother to design sounds. I've scoured a lot of forums, and read about how the team at Yamaha made the original presets. 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- definitely not everyone’s cup of tea).Įdit: 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:

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. I could see how someone could conclude that this destroys the reproducibility advantages of digital FM synthesis, while preserving the cheesiness of FM sounds. 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, ).

Reading this really drove home to me just how amusing some of the twists and turns of music tech development are.

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