Stop being a wanker

I just found some cool books / tutorials about Fm synthesis that were really interesting. For a long time I've just twiddled knobs until I got something that I liked, but I figured it was about time to learn a bit more about how to create certain sounds. I've met a few people who can create a patch really intentionally with great results and thought it was worth learning about.

http://noisesculpture.com/how-to-make-a-noise-frequency-modulation-synthesis < and a book on FM

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr00/articles/synthsecrets.htm < good article on FM

http://the-all.org/tx81z/fm_overview.html < this one's specifically about the TX81z

These are all related to FM as I've just finished my PreenFM kit and have been digging into that quite a bit. :)

Post some more tutorials or other good stuff if you know of any. There's a book on ebay I've been chasing for a while called "the synth cookbook" or something. Can't find a digital copy though.

"FM Theory and Applications: By Musicians for Musicians" by John Chowning & David Bristow:

http://www.spoogewor...pplications.pdf

Oh dip! By the inventor himself :) Good one I have lots of reading to do haha.

FM is pretty straight forward just a little long winded i.e. you dont just twiddle, you have to plan ahead a bit

if you can get your head around creating a simple sawtooth with two stacked sinewave operators (with a little feedback) and instead of using a lpf to cut the harmonics you vary the level the modulator into the carrier (kinda like a drawbar organ) the rest is getting creative with envelopes to give the sound some shape

I'm comfortable with add/sub/granular synthesis, fm is my weak spot.

One of my biggest pet peeves in electronic music is people who are all like "man I don't want to learn how to use this shit, that would destroy the magic! I just like twiddling the knobs, man. Sounds more unique that way!"

I'm assuming they mean unique in the has to be reminded to keep breathing way, because 9 times out of 10 what results from their aimless knob-globbery is some semi-tonal wib wob that doesn't fit the song at all. A person who understands synthesis can sit down & make the exact tone they hear in their head without hassle, whereas someone who doesn't will wander around for hours trying to find it & eventually settle for something that only kinda sorta fits. They may come across a lotta cool sounds but most won't be applicable.

It's kinda like a guitar player going YEAH MAN FUCK LEARNIN WHAT THE STRINGS DO, I JUST LIKE STICKIN MY MOUTH IN THE HOLE THING & MAKIN NOISES

  On 3/20/2012 at 3:39 PM, Cryptowen said:

It's kinda like a guitar player going YEAH MAN FUCK LEARNIN WHAT THE STRINGS DO, I JUST LIKE STICKIN MY MOUTH IN THE HOLE THING & MAKIN NOISES

lol, I wish more guitar players had that approach.

Nah, I think most of the fun of synths is jumping in with both feet without any/many preconceptions, wailing on knobs/buttons and being open to whatever the heck comes out. Patching isn't like buying a gun, you shouldn't need a waiting period or special training. Just have fun and don't take this shit so serious!

That said, I agree that FM synthesis is tricky. I just learnt what I know about it from modifying presets on my TX81Z when I was 17. I guess it was easier for me because I didn't have any "real" synths at the time so I was just blown away by being able to do things like portamento and timbral changes based on velocity.

haha sure there are all kinds of approaches. I just know that for me personally, I want to be able to more intentionally make the sounds I want. I have a MS2000 VA synth and I'm really comfortable with that synth. i can make nearly anything I want with it (except nice pads grr), but that took about 2 years of twiddling to get a good feel for it's sound and character. I'm still surprised sometimes when I modulate weird things together.

The Preen is actually really deep for such a little guy. Having 9 algorithms means that you will probably never get a perfect understanding of what each does on an intuitive level. They all sound super different. Then throw in 4 lfos, an assignable envelope (next to 1 for each osc) and 2 step sequencers and you have a little monster of a synth. :)

All for less than $100.

Next stop is a shruthi-1 for me, but I will wait a while as I want to be able to get into the preen before I have more distractions haha.

Sorry, I wasn't criticising you, more Cryptowen. It's definitely cool to learn your craft better, to soak up some new ideas. I just get irritated when people are like "You need to learn the RIGHT way! You need to PLAN things out!" I hear this kind of shit from certain classically trained musicians who think they're pretty righteous for knowing theory and being able to map out an entire song and suck all the life out of it before their fingers ever touch the gear. That's all fine, I just prefer to use my ears. Not saying you fit that mold, Crpyotwen (haven't listened your tunes) I'm just getting that vibe from your post.

That Preen looks cool, I saw that a while back. The demos on the site sound like ass though. I'd love to hear someone properly wreck this thing in a jam. It looks great on paper though, great features.

Less than $100, eh? I thought it was more than that for some reason. That might be cool to get sometime. I just bought PCBs and an enclosure for a 2nd Shruthi-1 myself, had to get one of those freaky azz digital filter boards.

Does it have a drum mode, where you can play different drum sounds on different keys? The Shruthi-1 doesn't, and it's one of the few things I feel it's missing at this point.

  On 3/20/2012 at 4:06 PM, sweepstakes said:

Sorry, I wasn't criticising you, more Cryptowen. It's definitely cool to learn your craft better, to soak up some new ideas. I just get irritated when people are like "You need to learn the RIGHT way! You need to PLAN things out!" I hear this kind of shit from certain classically trained musicians who think they're pretty righteous for knowing theory and being able to map out an entire song and suck all the life out of it before their fingers ever touch the gear. That's all fine, I just prefer to use my ears. Not saying you fit that mold, Crpyotwen (haven't listened your tunes) I'm just getting that vibe from your post.

Nah dawg that ain't what I meant. I don't plan things out beforehand neither, but I like being able to hear something, go "I bet that would sound good like this", then make it sound like that quicklike without frustration. If it don't sound good like that I can try something else without having spent half an hour making the patch.

People who don't know technical stuff don't bother me. It's people who think learning the technical stuff limits you somehow that confuse me.

Ah, gotcha. I agree. I think that everyone in general should to be open to new ideas. I just think it's obnoxious when people treat it like certain training is a requirement. I must have read you wrong there.

I definitely think that having some library to draw from, whether it's samples, patches, or a loose, general process for making stuff (preferably all the above) speeds up the process quite a bit because you don't have to re-invent the wheel every time you try to make a track. I think that all comes with experience, though.

For me breaking down those presets was very educational, it let me see what the moving parts were and how they interacted which I think is essential with FM. With subtractive stuff it's pretty intuitive, though, I think you can hit the ground running unless you try to do very weird stuff (which is where all the fun is!)

  On 3/20/2012 at 4:44 PM, sweepstakes said:

I definitely think that having some library to draw from, whether it's samples, patches, or a loose, general process for making stuff (preferably all the above) speeds up the process quite a bit because you don't have to re-invent the wheel every time you try to make a track. I think that all comes with experience, though.

That's basically been my experience with music.

Start experimenting aimlessly in a new area ->

Come across concepts I like ->

Make lots of tracks using those concepts & figure out exactly what I like about them & what they can do ->

Once they're basically internalized use them as the jumping off point for new experimentation ->

Process repeats

People who intentionally try to stay in the dark forever are limiting themselves from discovering new horizons.

you can get away with the happy 'tweak and see what happens' approach with pure analogue or modled analougue which is more often than not attenuated to prevent totally harsh digital noise and keep you in the sweet spots

with FM the sweet spots are very narrow so you have to have at least some idea of what your doing to the sound as a whole when tweaking or you'll spend a lot if time with a lot if shitty mess that all sounds the same

you'll find a lot if dx7 sounds were the combination of a few simple fm sounds layered and its rare you would need to stack any more than four operators

imho the FM7 was and still is the best traditional FM synth (especially with the user definable algorithms) with the FS1R being a slightly different beast

start simple from scratch whwn programming and build it up gradually, the more you put in the better it gets

With any other kind of synth, random twiddling definitely is possible to get a nice sound. Though doing the same with FM (as I know nothing really about it) I either get a noisy plastic twangy noise or no sound at all ...

  On 3/20/2012 at 3:58 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

Next stop is a shruthi-1 for me, but I will wait a while as I want to be able to get into the preen before I have more distractions haha.

fuck man, I've been keeping an eye on those shruthis before they came out. Sweet looking and sounding little machines, would love to build one.

Great thread! I'm going to work through those kindle books, from what I read so far it's well written and an easy read.

In my opinion, you can come up with good stuff not knowing what you are doing. However, anyone serious about this stuff should have a little background and know how things work. Almost every time I watch or read a tutorial, I learn something practical. Why would someone as an artist limit themselves by self imposed ignorance of their equipment?

Learning as much as possible is going to be helpful, but it must be balanced by screwing around and ignoring the theory sometimes!

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk

  On 3/20/2012 at 6:32 PM, 82DMC12 said:

Learning as much as possible is going to be helpful, but it must be balanced by screwing around and ignoring the theory sometimes!

Also FM7 rules, agree that it's the best traditional FM synth I've used, although I've never used FM8 and when I mention FM7 people often ask whether I've tried FM8.

I used to use VOPM ( http://www.geocities.jp/sam_kb/VOPM/ ) but as it's as fragile and stable as a glass hammer perched atop a spinning plate during a stiff breeze, I use the native Buzz fm synths instead.

That looks like it was built in SynthEdit. I made an FM synth in there called 3op, though I don't know what happened to it. That program was such a pain in the ass.

I never found any good FM synths in Buzz. All the ones I used either had so many parameters that they filled up more than the entire window, rendering them unusable, or they had oversimplified controls that didn't seem to be able to produce anything but organ sounds.

  On 3/20/2012 at 7:41 PM, sweepstakes said:

All the ones I used either had so many parameters that they filled up more than the entire window, rendering them unusable

Handily the new Buzz builds have parameter window scroll bars so all is right in the world again !

  On 3/20/2012 at 4:06 PM, sweepstakes said:

That Preen looks cool, I saw that a while back. The demos on the site sound like ass though. I'd love to hear someone properly wreck this thing in a jam. It looks great on paper though, great features.

 

Less than $100, eh? I thought it was more than that for some reason. That might be cool to get sometime. I just bought PCBs and an enclosure for a 2nd Shruthi-1 myself, had to get one of those freaky azz digital filter boards.

 

Does it have a drum mode, where you can play different drum sounds on different keys? The Shruthi-1 doesn't, and it's one of the few things I feel it's missing at this point.

hahah ya the demos are real dorky. :) but the developer is a flute player lol. He's a great guy, but is not really into electronic music ironically enough.

it can only do one timbre at a time, but thats not to say you couldn't cleverly map note numbers to some parameters to produce a range of drum sounds. That would be a great challenge.

It was under $100 because I only ordered the pcb, and bought the parts all locally. :) Plus it has no enclosure haha.

Let me know how that digital filter board is when you build it. Which board do you like the best?

  On 3/20/2012 at 8:21 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

hahah ya the demos are real dorky. :) but the developer is a flute player lol. He's a great guy, but is not really into electronic music ironically enough.

lol

  On 3/20/2012 at 8:21 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

it can only do one timbre at a time, but thats not to say you couldn't cleverly map note numbers to some parameters to produce a range of drum sounds. That would be a great challenge.

Ah, yeah, same deal with the Shruthi. Olivier (the dev) had a thread for firmware requests and I asked for two things and this was one of him. He ignored this one but he implemented the other, and he's usually cool about responding to stuff so I get the impression that it's just not a reasonable thing to try to do.

  On 3/20/2012 at 8:21 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

It was under $100 because I only ordered the pcb, and bought the parts all locally. :) Plus it has no enclosure haha.

Ah :P I get antsy when stuff doesn't have an encosure, I'm afraid it'll get really dusty or I'll spill something on it.

Yeah, that thing seems cool. It'll probably make me think about getting rid of my TX81Z once and for all, though. That makes me kinda sad :( Haha, synth attachment issues.

  On 3/20/2012 at 8:21 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

Let me know how that digital filter board is when you build it. Which board do you like the best?

I just have the vanilla default SMR-4 board right now. I like it although the filter cutoff doesn't go quite as low as I'd like. I'm thinking of modding it to go lower, should just be a matter of adding a resistor somewhere.

The Polivoks looks cool though, esp. since it has a BPF mode, but the demos sound way too aggressive for me. I'm interested in the Dual SVF as well, since you can change the configuration (parallel/serial) of the filters onboard, but it's still all-analog.

The digital one has built in effects, like delay and comb filter, that you can modulate in the mod matrix. I love doing freaky stuff with delay and feedback so I am pretty excited about that, lo-fi or not, it seems right up my alley. Not sure when my PCBs are supposed to get here but my enclosure came on Monday. Still need to order the chips and stuff.

So there's no chip to flash on the filter boards right?

Flashing the maple mini on the preen was a bit of a pain in the ass, and it even has a usb port LOL. I just had to install a virtual windoze machine to do it D:

I've lost count of how many times I've posted this: http://rhordijk.home...all.nl/G2Pages/

The examples are done on the Nord Modular G2, but the information is obviously applicable on other synths. HIGHLY recommended.