Never heard!
Thx for the tip
Kronos’s MOD7 synthesis engine is fully DX7 compatible and more: filters, processors, sample as modulator, other synth engine’s (EXi) output as modulator, etc. The editing experience is a mix between GUI involving a patch cable-operator view with editing text values. User-friendliness was however never Kronos’s focus.
So, I’ve tried a load of times and while in principal I ‘get’ FM and how it works, has anyone come across any really good (easy) resources for learning the nuts and bolts.
Like with subtractive, there are a load of basic rules/concepts like ‘want a woody sound? use a triangle’ etc but I’ve never really ever managed to feel like I’ve got a good enough grasp of the basics (even though I know enough to build decent enough stuff on the Digitone, I really don’t have the same fundamentals as I do with vanilla synthesis)
TLDR: FM is hard, how learn?
IIRC, Chowning wrote some papers and possibly a book on how to analyze sounds and then create an FM patch that mimics the sound.
My approach is to think of the DX7 architecture as a very minimalistic modular synth. The algorithm is the arrangement of patch cables. Levels influence how much an operator modifies a carrier. Envelopes do it over time. I usually dial in the frequency ratios and then add envelopes. Works well for generating otherworldly sounds, which is what I usually want.
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I think my gap is probably the abstraction, if I sit and think hard about an algo, I get what it’s doing, I just find it really hard to translate the sound in my head into FM I guess?
I sort of suspect I have too much experience and options in other areas that unless I’m having a dedicated Digitone session, I generally won’t bother with FM.
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I think you have to both enjoy the challenge of FM and want to achieve something you can’t with your other synths.
Something about how the early Warp artists used FM hooked me.
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Chowning’s book is called “FM Theory and Applications” (1986) and is pretty tied to the DX7. While translating it to other devices is not out of the question, it’s going to be some work.
I’ve been doing 2-op FM with my modular to get a better sense of things. At some point I intend to dive into the Digitone, probably with the aid of @DaveMech’s course.
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Does anyone use an FM synth with a MIDI controller for more of a full hands-on experience? Are there some models in particular that have great MIDI implementation?
I found this paper to be extremely helpful - the title was not promising but it is super informative and well written.
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Great album and they did use the FS1r a bit as far as I know… don’t know on which albums tho. Big users of Max also and in some of Mark Fell’s solo stuff he’s quite explicit about what he’s using. If I remember rightly it was Manitshutu where he was explicit about what FM patches were being used and he also used a pre-release version Native Instruments Razor.
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iirc Mark Fell said Atavism is all/mostly FS1R
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Would be fun to combine the 8op algorithms with a game of Snake so it modulates between them as it crawls around the screen
Or Breakout, as a moving pixel slow removes an op block at time from the array
Of course Tetris, they could fall and neutralize other op blocks in the same row
I’m calling my new FM synth “Thee Blockchain”
Dr Chownings book is a great resource for getting the key concepts down.
Brian Eno was famously one of the few people who figured out how to create hundreds of new patches on the DX7 and used it on many of his albums. Apparently everyone else just used the presets, also with great results
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I’ve only see them perform with laptops so no idea if they use hardware. Cool project for sure. Ryoji ikeda is another FM experimental classic.
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interesting. i only knew Multistability, which i always thought was made with Supercollider(?)
(not hardware but also amazingly cool for FM if you have the patience)
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(Sorry, we might be derailing, but would you have recommendations (i.e. links) to Ikeda’s specifically FM work? I searched a bit and found interesting stuff but it didn’t sound absolutely FMy - for what it means)
I don’t know for sure whether he used Supercollider or not, I can imagine that he might have. But this sent me down the rabbit hole of reading old interviews with him. Seems he definitely uses Max a whole lot and has a long standing appreciation for FM. This article - Mark Fell on his love of FM synthesis and algorithmic composition - is particularly interesting although I can’t figure out which Yamaha he’s using in the main photo - looks like it might be some PSR rather than DX. There is some interesting stuff about how they used a TX81Z and it’s interesting multi-mode. I guess you could sort of emulate that with sound locks on the Digitone. Would be even cooler if you could point an LFO at the sound pool… anyway, I’m rambling.
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I posted a few links in the “FM music/artist” thread a while back but they’re taken down now 
worth checking his YT channel though. He does FM synthesis in a non-traditional way though and I would be surprised if he (still?) uses any actual hardware. Basically cranking the carrier and modulator to the highest frequencies at the fringe of human hearing. Or in some cases just using sine waves, introducing feedback etc.
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Thanks for posting that article, interesting read!
I’m totally not sure either if he used SC. but in the past i’ve been messing a lot with the pattern library and it suits arithmic series and growing/shrinking patterns a la Multistability very well (and it’s great for FM)
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