Do y’all know a sysex pack for this? Or multiple that you recommend? I tend to like to combine sounds we know and sounds that really bizarre. I like both.
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Handpan:
Acoustic piano:
Flute / bassoon / clarinet:
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If you mean orchestral or world instruments for the DN, you might not find too much.
Generally speaking FM synthesis has not been invented to imitate as close as possible mechanical instruments. It’s feasable, but sometimes quite hard, because FM synthesis is so different from mechanical sound creation. It takes a very flexible FM machine, which the DN isn’t, with six to eight operators and corresponding sets of algorithms, to simulate mechanical instruments.
For the sake of simplicity, user friendliness, and no rocket-science-degree needed, the DN is not as versatile as a DX7, a Montage, or a MODX. We can easily achieve very convincing bell and cymbal like sounds or organ like sounds on the DN, but this is in the DNA of FM anyway.
Simulation of mechanical instruments is easier done with subtractive synthesis and best with samples.
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…well, in first place the concept of “fm” was invented for exacly this…
on some sunny day in the late 50ies of the last century…!!!..
…to be able to “mock” any existing soundsignature…
AND anything beyond or inbetween…
literatually EVERYTHING that’s possible within the audible frequencyspectrum…
end of the day, ALL WE HEAR is nothing but vibrating air…
frequencies that get modulated in to be further specified ways and orders…
interacting in endless ratios and relations with and to each other…
and the more we organize it, the more we like to call it “music”…
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Well, I might be misinformed. Can you point me to some sources please … I am very interested to learn more about its history.
I thought after beeing used for VHF radio broadcasting for some time, FM Synthesis was invented more or less as Wikipedia tells the story, which starts about in the 1960 as follows:
History
1960s - 1980s
By the mid-20th century, frequency modulation (FM), a means of carrying sound, had been understood for decades and was being used to broadcast radio transmissions.[5] FM synthesis was developed in the 1960s at Stanford University, California, by John Chowning, who was trying to create sounds different from analog synthesis. His algorithm was licensed to Japanese company Yamaha in 1973.[2] The implementation commercialized by Yamaha (US Patent 4018121 Apr 1977[6] or U.S. Patent 4,018,121[7]) is actually based on phase modulation, but the results end up being equivalent mathematically as both are essentially a special case of quadrature amplitude modulation
Have there been earlier instruments, which did not only modulate a VCO with another VCO at audio rates?
Thanks, great link and reading!
IMO it could be hard to re-do some of the patch ideas on a DN, because the operators B1, B2 can not be programmed as independant as in many other FM synths.
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is a nice recent video about the history of FM: Chowning and Yamaha.
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…wikipedia is always right, right?.. 
late 50ies or early 60ies…don’t nail me down on it…on a sunny day…in california…
and he defenitly did’nt just found out about it from one day to the other…
i just wanted to underline the fact, that this concept has been part of the sonic game in quite a while already, since many people think of dx7 and 80ies straight away and only, whenever they hear “fm”…
and that it had way more technical reasons for research and making use of it in first place, than in “just” making sounds with it for fun, is a common thing…even tape and later on harddiskrecording were also first invented for pure strategical purposes…and not for capturing music…
I picked the Wikipedia, because it’s one of the links, Google finds always … the great Encyclopedia Britannica says the same … as many other sources.
I was just wondering, whether I had missed something. Nobody knows everything and I’m always interested to learn
BTW for the interested … the “concept” of FM was invented by Edwin Howard Armstrong to reduce disturbances in radio frequency transmission. His paper was published 1939.
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so that’s for me to build it myself, right? and/or for me to make instrument like sounds, etc…
so no one just has a bunch of downloadable sysx that rapid-solve this problem? (definitely down to sound design my way there eventually, but would like to have an easy starting places; this seems like it’s something that must already probably exist).
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I’m saving that!
Awesome to see this written up in depth.
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Yes, it’s intended as a teaching guide and is quite in depth. As someone else commented, the DN has some limitations with some operator parameters, that might make it impossible to follow the process he uses (I don’t have a DN, I use a Preen FM2 which does not have those limitations). But you will sure learn alot about FM sound design, even if you aren’t really interested in re-creating real instruments.
Have you looked at whether any of the digitone soundpacks on the elektron site would suit your needs?
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The reason for this might be that there aren’t so much sound designers doing this.
If you read the great tutorial, which @ericd linked, you will see that the method is quite combersome. It’s basically the analysis of a recorded spectrum, which has been taken as a single sample of an instrument at a given pitch, and then to try to re-built this spectrum with FM synthesis. Depending on the complexity and flexibility of the FM synth machine this venture can be successful or just not feasable.
To synthesize one “sample” of an instrument with FM synthesis doesn’t mean that this synthesized sound will be true over the entire range of pitches of the original instrument. Just compare this to sampled instruments. Consider how many different samples have to be recorded and processed for various pitches, velocities, and what not, until the sampled instrument sounds as natural and as real as possible as the original. Same goes for synthesis.
IMO to re-create sounds of original instruments as close as possible, additive synthesis, phyiscal modeling, and particularly sampling are better choices than other methods.
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Yes, I downloaded them all, and I’m going to use a lot of the sounds, but few of them are “normal”; I like to balance classical sounds and insane sounds (instruments and instruments).
So, it’s sort of sounding like if I want to use classical instruments, use it on my digitakt (ARG Y IS THERE NO POLYPHONY!!!), and if I want to use crazyface sounds, get those out of the digitone. I can live with this, but I miss playing piano and hitting four keys at a time for a chord, lol.
I’m assuming the digitone can’t sequence like a piano on the digitakt polyphonically, right?
What do you think is the most fool-proof/beginner friendly way of sequencing classical instruments with the digitone? Like, should I get a bunch of vsts in ableton? Should I get some other synth (what do you recommend) that has all this stuff inside it, and have the tone sequence it?
these are both very incredible machines and I love them both, I’m just bumping up against getting polyphony with some traditional instruments… if I could add that, then all the other craziness I’m doing, sampling ghost in the shell, making insane changing drum patterns, etc., would fit into this larger whole that I think would really work for me.