From the original SynthMaker forum (2004–2014), with its members’ names and dates.
joeymofo ·
Hi there,
I've built a basic FM synth, going through a tutorial. It is creating some insane sounds, and i'm not entirely sure whether it is meant to be creating these sounds! Because i am such a noob i have no idea what type of sound should be coming from this FM synth, but I would love any feedback as to what is going on here, whether it is supposed to, or not, and why. Thanks for any help guys.
joeymofo
MichaelBenjamin ·
yes this is a basic fm, since you modulate the oscillator frequency inputs with the outputs.
joeymofo ·
so there is nothing wrong with this synth whatsoever?
philter5 ·
i like the strange sounds i can get out of your synth. nice work! 😉
MichaelBenjamin ·
no, theres nothing wrong with it in principle of design, but there is many room for improvements. if you are looking for typical dx7 fm sounds it will be a bit more difficult i guess. i didnt dive into the whole fm thing, but as far as i understood it, its about how you setup the routings and modulations and how much oscillators you use. dx7 used 4, sy77 used 6 and they had some~16 different hardwired setups you could choose. the sound programming was quite difficult, as with fm there is a vast range of "crap" sounds and to learn how to find the good combinations seemed to be quite an adventure.
joeymofo ·
rather than improving this one, i am looking to implement this into my main synth i have been making which has 4 oscillators. i'm not sure how it should be done so i'm going to look into it over the next few days... thanks for the feedback!
MichaelBenjamin ·
thanks, i just found this, seems to be a good read about fm: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr00/a ... ecrets.htm
joeymofo ·
so, being a total noob, i'm unsure where to go from here.
I have created a subtractive synth which i have put alot of effort into, and a small basic FM synth.
I cannot work out how to implement the FM synth inside the subtractive, as i would like to create sounds using the 4 oscillators from my main synth mixed with the sounds of the FM synth. I'm sure this must be possible, but adding the FM synth in as 'another oscillator' fails for me. If anyone could just point me in the right direction for implementing the FM synth into Synthia i would be very happy!
Thanks for the time and effort guys, Joey
(fm synth download further up this thread, Synthia download on this post)
joeymofo ·
ok guys, got an update! i've realised i can obviously use the same system as i did with those effects but i've stumbled at the point of how to link the output of my normal synth with the input of my fm synth. (this is how i did it with the effect modules) Is this even the correct way to do it? The screenshot shows the audio outputs and the midi inputs which is where the problem is. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Updated OSM file too!
MichaelBenjamin ·
what do you want to do exactly? if you want to modulate the second synths frequency with the output of the first one, you should rip out the oscillator section and everything after from the second, and paste it in the first, where you delete then everything from the combiners on and use the final stage from the second one as output.
joeymofo ·
sorry i didn't explain myself properly, i've got in a bit of a muddle !
i want to be able to switch between each synth but i didn't think about the fact that i also want them to be completely seperate, so u use one or the other via the tabs.
MichaelBenjamin ·
ah ok. you need an always visible switch and your 2 synth modules, which would be displayed or not, depending on the switch setting. search the forum for gui panel hide, or the wiki - this should explain how you make modules visible/hide them. after that get 2 selectors and route the midi in/the output of each synth according to the selection of the switch. heres an attachment for the stream routing:
joeymofo ·
Thanks for the help here! The routing system works fine, and i have fixed my tabs which are swapping the synth displays.
Now the only thing i need to do is find a way of making the switch change along with the tabs. So you click on Synthia and the switch goes to Synthia, and you click on the Synthia FM tab and the switch goes to the other way. This is definately possible but does it require me modding the GUI part?
(updated OSM file added)
joeymofo ·
i think i've saved myself any problems by allowing each synth to be turned on or off so they can be used together or each on their own. i'm almost finished with this project now hooray!
Batteryman ·
joeymofo wrote: i think i've saved myself any problems by allowing each synth to be turned on or off so they can be used together or each on their own. i'm almost finished with this project now hooray!
Slighly off topic: there are other ways to modulate sounds, such as Bit depth , Sample rate and feeback loop a OSC whit itself , it can make some interesting sweeping sounds when you slighly distort forexample a Sinus wave to a Saw-like.
If you modulate the Bit depth you can also make new harsh sounds. By modulate the Samplerate, you also can make some very harsh squarish like sounds, but this is a bit extreme..
Back to topic: good luck whit your synth, and yeah FM is very cool, try also to feed SineOSC + SquareOSC into the freq input of the Carrier, this makes some interesting synthetic distortion guitarish sounds, but this requred carefully adjust.
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