FM synths

Aparillo is niche and different in GUI, but I dig it.
Tracktion is working on F'em, a new FM synth on the horizon. One can wonder if it will be a step up from others.
Just brainstorming (I use Ableton's Operator often, but it is only for Live).

Dirtgrain said:

Aparillo is niche and different in GUI, but I dig it.
Tracktion is working on F'em, an new FM synth on the horizon. One can wonder if it will be a step up from others.
Just brainstorming (I use Ableton's Operator often, but it is only for Live).

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Listening at the first demo of Aparillo. OMG.

Aparillo is one of the coolest things I’ve played with in a while. Sooooo good.

As for FM, I’ve been having a bit of a renaissance with it myself. Having grown up in the DX heyday, i’ve always loved those sounds - and lately I’ve discovered just how warm and organic it can be. I now have (12) real DX engines in my studio: a pair of original DX7s, a DX5, and a TX816. I’ve really come up with some incredible stuff, so I’m working on a sample-based product that’s built on all of that. It’s been a blast!

If it's the sounds that you are interested to, and not programming, UVI makes beautiful recordings of the original instruments. With all the graininess and depth of the original instruments.

Paolo

Yes! FM is cool

Uhe Bazille
Waves Flow Motion
Dexed

I quite like Flow Motion’s interface and sound. It’s one that doesn’t get much attention but for $29.99 it is a killer synth.

EDITED:
Also, Arturia DX7 V. I quite like to have 6OP FM at my disposal and the user interface of this one is better than Dexed. It sounds very good and I prefer this one over FM8 as it is easier to program. And it is WAY easier to program than the original DX

EDIT 2:
Not forgetting UVI Falcon 2. This one has 4OP FM on board as well, next to a load of extremely well designed other stuff. If you’re looking for a more modular approach...

whinecellar said:

I now have (12) real DX engines in my studio: a pair of original DX7s, a DX5, and a TX816.

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Nice! Here we have two DX7 mk 1, one DX7 II, a TX816 (only two TF1s though, so technically a TX812?), a TX7 and a TX802. And a broken DX9. So that would be 7? So much fun to have around and play. A DX5 is beautiful!

Dirtgrain said:

Aparillo is niche and different in GUI, but I dig it.

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I don’t have this one. It sounds nice but also slightly gimmicky to my ears. As it is only 2 operator FM how good would this one be if you wanted to create sounds rather than weird arpeggiated stuff? Anyone use this for actual sound creation / “playable” sounds?

Edit april 2022: a while ago I bought Aparillo for $39. It is crazy good.

Tracktion's Biotek 2. Each of the four voices in a patch can be a 4-op FM synth and you have a choice of waveforms. So you can build parallel FM patches, which can be useful for more complex sounds that don't use complex FM structures individually, or just combine them with the sample or granular voices for emphasis. It has an LFO sequencer which can be handy for underscore-type situations to get movement. It was on sale last week and will probably be on sale again (probably July 4 as IIRC Tracktion tend to do something for that).

Tone2 Nemesis is a simple 2-op structure but with a choice of FM styles so it's relatively easy to program and flip between variations to see whether they sound better.

doctoremmet said:

I don’t have this one. It sounds nice but also slightly gimmicky to my ears. As it is only 2 operator FM how good would this one be if you wanted to create sounds rather than weird arpeggiated stuff? Anyone use this for actual sound creation / “playable” sounds?

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Aparillo's main feature is the way it uses swarms and clouds of sound particles. It's best to think of it as a granular but with FM granules rather than chunks of samples.

gamma-ut said:

Aparillo's main feature is the way it uses swarms and clouds of sound particles. It's best to think of it as a granular but with FM granules rather than chunks of samples.

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Gotcha! Thx for the headsup

I've grown to appreciate, if not love, FM8. Programming any FM patch requires a small adjustment to my way of thinking. I started out on an ARP 2600, which allowed for a bit of frequency modulation, certainly not FM synthesis, but still gets the basic idea across. Still, it is a different way of thinking about sound.

I still have a TX7 (which gets very little use) and a pair of TX-81zs. I never owned a DX7 (which makes me somewhat unique, or downright odd), I did have a TX-802 for a while, it was cool.

And yet these days I use FM8 more than the hardware (laziness?), and I've tried the FM capabilities in some of the other soft-synths, but none of them have really grabbed me. While Alchemy was supported for Windows I did spend some time using it for FM, and Zebra2 has some serious FM chops. If all I want is a period accurate(ish) preset I usually use the Arturia emulation. DXED sounds great, but I did not get along with the UI. And so on...

FM is cool, for some of us the Yamaha approach is ingrained. making it difficult to appreciate other approaches - not unlike the shift from subtractive to FM I guess???

I am watching demos for Aparillo, it looks interesting.

I get pangs of nostalgia playing my DX7 sounds in FM8.

Specifically, there are two sounds I made back then that still stand up.

DX7s still sound awesome and every time I fire up a hardware version I feel inspiration. The cheese factor of 99% of the old presets notwithstanding. Doesn’t Brian Eno still use his extensively?

I think the DX range has a bit of that cheese stigma due to the presets they came with, but they're capable of way more than those damn marimba sounds
I guess the not so user friendly button interface on the DX/TX range didn't help much either!
I have a DX11 that I love to bits.

This one is also pretty cool, based one a later FM chip designed by Yamaha for Sega, and it's on sale now.

I wish Yamaha would release a rack version of it's Montage synth which I would immediately buy for its FM-X implementation (which can then used from your DAW with the Montage's direct USB link).

To me nothing sounds better in terms of FM.

funnybear said:

I wish Yamaha would release a rack version of it's Montage synth which I would immediately buy for its FM-X implementation (which can then used from your DAW with the Montage's direct USB link).

To me nothing sounds better in terms of FM.

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Unfortunately I have never had the chance to play around with that particular 8OP FM engine, but demos of it sound good.

No members sporting an FS1R? Those babies are pretty expensive nowadays (overpriced imho) but I wouldn’t mind owning one...

You can't beat the free DEXED. Get it HERE

You can load up the zillions of free DX7 presets you can find on the internet into it, from sites like THIS and THIS. There is even a single file you can download that gives you over 13,000 files. (It's in the PluginGuru video below)

You can do that with FM8 and Arturia's DX7 too, but they cost $$.

Anyway, Dexed is included in PluginGuru's UNIFY, which includes PG selected Dexed patches. John Lehmkuhl recently made this video about how to get the most out of it.