FM Synthesis Explained: A Musician's Guide To FM 🔥 | feat. Kilohearts Phase Plant

howdy duty buccaroonies the 1960s were a pretty interesting time with things like smoking on airplanes or students at mit creating a four-story icicle a man watering roses with his own blood the nypd conducting weird cross-dressing sting operations or a woman filing for divorce because her husband kept squeezing tomatoes in her face things were as the kids say a poppin elsewhere in the 1960s at stanford university john chowning was bored of analog synthesizers and would go on to forever change the music landscape as we know it with his invention of fm synthesis and i wonder sometimes if he knew at that time what kind of sonic hellscape he was about to unleash on the world for the better part of two decades by the 1970s yamaha started to realize the massive potential of fm synthesis and started beginning work on some of the first big major digital synthesizers in 1978 the synclavir 1 released which had this fm engine and yamaha soon followed after with their gs1 which landed with a resounding thud selling only i think about a hundred units but while these are landmarks in the early years of digital synthesis and fm synthesizers they are but a faint flicker in the shadow of the explosive gigantic sonic hell that is public enemy number one of fm synthesis the yamaha dx7 equally loved and hated by musicians and engineers the world over the dx7 would change the sonic palette of most of the chart topping hits of the 80s and early 90s with its now infamous factory library of 128 presets this i think is in large part because the dx7 is an absolute nightmare to program it would be like trying to write a novel on a nokia 3310 there were only a few musicians who really pushed the dx7 to its limits with i think brian eno probably being the best example now today we have something like dext which we can use to program patches for the dx7 but back in the day you had this little tiny screen with a very limited character count to program what was probably at the time one of the most complex synthesizers ever built because of the enormously deep complexity of the dx7 and it's kind of extremely tedious and terrible interface to work with most people scrolled through presets and a handful of these became some of the most infamous sounds in all of music fm synthesis is really cool stuff it's capable of everything from really nice warm keys sounds to incredibly lush modulated pads to really cutting edge modern dubstep bases to the taco bell bong sound and just about everything in between lucky for us in this day and age we don't have to work with dx7s we have tons of amazing choices to get started with fm synthesis with things like dext or surge or vital or the arteria dx7v or just about anything a lot of synthesizers have some kind of fm features built in anymore making it very easy and accessible and approachable even for the most basic level musician understanding of how to program a synthesizer and i'm very glad and thankful for this because programming a dx7 is like i i don't even know it's like trying to pull my eyes out through my ears using those little tweezers that come with that game operator in this video here today i couldn't think of a better tool to demonstrate and teach fm synthesis with than kilohertz phase plant because it has an amazing ui and workflow it's very visual it's very easy to pick up and get started with and it makes fm synthesis really easy approachable and a whole lot of fun originally when i set out to make this video about fm synthesis i spent a couple months putting together this absolutely exhaustive presentation and lecture about all things fm synthesis and patch ideas and all this stuff and after sitting down and doing a dry read as i usually do before i sit down and actually film the video i realized it was incredibly boring and dry and like four people would watch it so instead i rewrote this whole thing and today i'm here to present to you the musician's guide to fm synthesis in this video my goal is to teach you by the end of this video how to start programming fm synth patches yourself and getting actual usable musical results fm synthesis also just has kind of a special place in my heart because native instruments fm8 was the first synthesizer i ever used and in hindsight this was an actually terrible decision but it was a lot of fun so with that let's get into it to begin i think we should cover the basic ideas of fm synthesis and how it works because we need to walk before we can run and before you know it you'll be off creating your own sick yoinks and whoops and womps and things like that because despite fm synthesis being based around a lot of really complex mathy stuff it's actually not that difficult to understand so fm what is it fm stands for frequency modulation and most synthesizers in practice actually use phase modulation but for all intents and purposes it's really the same thing and to my understanding it's just easier to implement phase modulation instead of true fm and there's no real benefit to one over the other except in a couple little edge cases but none of that really matters the only thing you need to know is that fm means frequency modulation frequency in case you didn't know is the pitch of a sound or the number of cycles in a second if we have a really low frequency sound it's only happening a couple times per second but if we have a very high frequency sound it's happening a lot of times in a second and that is frequency so the idea being we are going to modulate that and that is fm so what does this actually mean in practice in fm synthesis we have two main players in one corner here we have the carrier which is the sound that we hear and comes out of our speakers or in simpler terms it's the guy that takes you out of the bar and punches you because you're talking words funny down here in the other corner we have its friend the modulator which is anything that applies modulation to frequency of the carrier or to another modulator or in simpler terms it's the guy's friend who stands behind him telling him how hard to punch you now in yamaha's world of fm synthesis each of these also has an envelope attached to it which forms what we know as an operator so we have this envelope here controlling the level of our carrier and then we can create this envelope here controlling the level of our modulator so considering that most fm synthesizers are polyphonic it's like having dozens and dozens of individual synthesizers all in one a lot of today's synthesizers with something like serum maybe feature only a handful of carriers and modulators often only one or two however things like the dx7 had six operators and things like fm8 or phase plant can have even more making this get pretty complicated pretty quickly with that in mind the more operators we add the more complicated our patches get and then we have to start involving algorithms which is a big scary word but it doesn't really mean much an algorithm is simply how we allow these different carriers and modulators to interact we can have more than one carrier we can have more than one modulator we can have modulators targeting carriers in different ways we can do lots of different things which we will cover here in a moment let's cover one of the most basic fm patches that you've probably done dozens of times here we have a sine wave and if i play this it comes out sounding like this really not that exciting let's go in and add an lfo now in case you didn't know lfo stands for low frequency oscillator and we can use this to modulate different things in this case let's bring it in and target the pitch or the frequency now if i give this a play again we'll see that it's moving the frequency of that oscillator up and down and up and down and up and down and that is actually what fm is like i said it's really not that complicated and now if we bring in an envelope and we drop the level of this lfo and then we use this envelope to control the level of this lfo we have now created an operator so let's make it fade in over time and then fade out to like 30 percent if we give this another play we'll hear it swoop up and apply a lot of fm and then go down and apply not as much fm fascinating stuff now i know that this patch doesn't sound all that interesting but it does very well demonstrate the core idea of fm synthesis but if we take this lfo and we speed it way way up into the audio range we start to get some more interesting results here we have a very very basic fm synth patch and what we're going to do is take the output of this oscillator here and tie it to the phase modulation of the first oscillator like that and if we give this a play you'll hear what happens [Music] pretty gross stuff but that is the foundational idea of everything we're going to do from here on out as you can hear changing the amount has a pretty significant impact so a little bit goes a pretty long way now from here we can start to mess with what is called ratios if we look at the harmonic control here we see that this is times one and times one and if we go up we can change the ratio so we can do two to one and three to one four to one and so on now one thing to keep in mind is that this is actually harmonic ratios in terms of their relationship and frequency this isn't like going up an octave or a semitone it's going up based on a multiplication of the frequency so this is two times three times four times so on you get the idea and if we do this quickly we can scroll through the harmonic series [Music] pretty gross stuff fm synthesis gets pretty complicated pretty quick and the amount of modulation we apply the ratio between the carrier and modulator or different carriers or different modulators and all that stuff can entirely change the way a sound feels very very quickly it's pretty powerful stuff and if you're not careful it can get away from you in just a couple small tweaks now let's quickly talk about algorithms and then we'll get into making actual musical patches and not just sine waves doodling around with each other i'm going to add in just a couple other oscillators here we'll set these to all these sine waves and this will allow us to quickly demonstrate what an algorithm is in fm synthesis now in something like the dx7 we had a fixed number of algorithms or ways that these oscillators could interact with each other but in things like phase plant we can do whatever we want because we're free to route these however we would like for the sake of keeping things simple let's call these one two three and four now what we can do is route maybe two into one to get started now let's route three into two now let's route four into one [Music] and let's change some ratios and stuff from here we could do lots of weird things as well like add feedback so i'm going to feed two back into itself and that's going to create this really [Music] gross noise and now from simple sine waves we've created a very dense rich sound from here it's very simple to modify the algorithm let's say we wanted to have two carriers and two modulators so now we could add maybe three into one and we've got two going directly out and let's add four going into three and three with a little bit of feedback going into itself and let's change the ratios again here and now from sine waves we've created something totally new we could adjust the level of these things [Music] and ta-da we've got a whole new algorithm in a matter of seconds the final thing i wanted to cover very quickly is the idea of linear versus exponential fm because these are two very different things if we bring in our basic setup here again we have what is called linear fm because what we're going to do is take this and there is a linear relationship between these two pitches now let's talk about exponential fm if we set our ratio or the harmonic to zero then we could set this to a fixed frequency like let's say 433 hertz now what's going to happen is our carrier is going to change in pitch as i play it but our modulator isn't this sounds pretty gross on its own but with something like a short envelope controlling the level of this we can actually create some pretty musical bell-like tones now let's add a longer decay to that and you'll hear kind of what i'm talking about [Music] a little bit ugly but it has a nice bell-like metallic quality and those are the two big different types of fm typically you're going to work with linear fm more often than not and a lot of your basic synthesizers restrict you to that but something like phase plan offers both linear and exponential fm options now that we've got all the basics out of the way let's quickly cover some fm sound design tips one of the biggest things is using different waveforms here so let's just create a basic operator by adding in an envelope maybe something about like so we'll use this to control the level we'll drop this down to zero and we'll use this to modulate our carrier now sine waves are fun maybe we could change the ratio and we've got just a pretty straightforward maybe key sound there not really that interesting but one core idea that's a lot of fun is changing the waveforms now with the dx7 we were restricted to sine waves and after that there were a couple other waveforms added but in something like phase plant we could switch this to a triangle or a square or a saw and we can do all sorts of weird things and have these interacting in lots of weird ways but that can very quickly elevate a sound so let's do maybe a saw and do a saw and we start to get kind of a pulse width modulated [Music] maybe synced saw lead sound another big idea is to keep your ratios relatively simple if we did maybe just uh sign into a triangle here this is two to one [Music] which has a pretty musical feel to it but if we did something weird like let's say 6.253 to 1 [Music] we start to get into some weird maybe not so harmonically useful territory especially when we start adding in more operators let's do something like that and we'll just add another envelope here to control the level and we'll just see what happens so we've got six point two five three to one then we'll feed in a nine point six eight one two six two point i don't really know but anyways the point being this starts to get [Music] pretty yucky pretty quickly so by using something simpler here like let's say six to one and then we'll do eight we get this which is still maybe a bit gross and we'll drop the levels of this down but that's a lot more musically useful than something maybe like that with that being said weird ratios can be useful if we drop this down maybe an octave or so we start to get some interesting growly bassy tones let's maybe drop these down a little bit [Music] with a bit of added distortion or something and some dc offset we can get some very clanging destructive bell tones and lots of weird bases and things like that another useful idea is to use complicated waveforms driving simple ones so let's maybe grab a wave table here let's just hunt through and grab something interesting like this crystal and let's tie an lfo to scroll through that wave table over time maybe something about like that and now we will control the level of this with our envelope to create an operator and we'll feed the output of this into the phase input of our triangle wave and let's maybe slow all of this way way way on down and we could get kind of a cool pad sort of thing going on maybe like that [Music] and that is a very powerful idea and a very powerful rich sound without a whole lot going on and from here you could add simple reverb delay filter whatever and create something very harmonically rich and expressive and dynamic with that same idea in mind here with only a handful of elements we've created a very dynamic moving morphing interesting harmonically rich sound and that's kind of the key i think is to keep things relatively simple if you add too many carriers and modulators and operators and weird algorithms and tons of stuff like that it can get away from you pretty quickly and become noisy on useful garbage so keeping things relatively straightforward with only a handful of elements is often best another big and easy idea is to add more modulation and expression with envelopes and lfos and other subtle movements over time so let's maybe add in another operator here let's add a sine wave we'll mod this triangle just a little bit we'll bring in another envelope and we'll make this extremely extremely slow and subtle so we'll move that around i just want to move the level 16 maybe we'll make this three to one here and then we'll add another lfo that's going to maybe affect the rate of our lfo affecting the wave table so let's tie this to that maybe only two percent will make this relatively slow and now with just a couple quick tweaks we've got something that's a lot more interesting [Music] so now with those things added we've quickly created something a bit more interesting let's just add a quick filter to this and maybe we'll tie this same envelope to that filter cutoff and now we've got something make that poly as well now we've got something that's going to be a lot more expressive and interesting [Music] foreign another easy and fun idea is subtly detuning things so let's get rid of that filter and just listen to these two [Laughter] speed up that envelope a bit here we have a very clean sound but if we add a little bit of detuning maybe we'll just adjust the harmonic a little bit [Music] we can get kind of a nice beating thing going on or we could shift this by a couple hertz or even just detune it with the semitone and scent control let's detune this by like 18 cents once we add that in along with our wave table which we can also detune just a bit we start to get some more interesting organic movements let's just shave off the high end because it's a little harsh and that can make an fm sound feel a lot more organic and musical rather than being totally fixed and clean and digital one other thing to keep in mind is that fm synthesis can do a lot of interesting things from bells and whatnot and metallic tones to wooden or plastic sounding tones or lots of other things so you could use this to add a metallic layer to a snare or maybe a nice wooden feel to your kick drum patch or just about anything like that it's a very powerful sound design tool that can complement a lot of other things without too much effort finally i think the biggest thing i can leave you with in terms of sound design tips when it comes to fm synthesis is not to stress about it too much fm synthesis is really complicated stuff and even the smallest tweak can completely destroy a patch and it's going to happen at some point or another just remember to keep things relatively simple don't try and over complicate the patch and experiment with small subtle tweaks and evolutions to a patch because it will often surprise you at how crazy things can get without too much going on fm synthesis is a really cool powerful creative tool and is certainly something you should know about for your sound design arsenal and with a little bit of practice and patience you will quickly be creating things you have never heard before or even thought possible i think that wraps everything up for my musician's guide to fm synthesis this was i guess relatively simple but hopefully a very helpful video and informative and maybe gives you some ideas to start experimenting with if you enjoyed this video and you would maybe like more things like this in the future let me know what you would like me to cover down in the comments that brings us to the end of this video so thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed it i hope you liked it i hope you learned something and as always i hope this inspires you to get out there and make something awesome be sure to like and subscribe and i will see you guys again soon you

Channel: Venus Theory

Views: 28,753

Keywords: Venus Theory, sound design, bitwig, bitwig studio, fl studio, logic pro x, ableton, cubase, fm synthesis, fm synthesis explained, fm synthesizer, fm synthesis tutorial, synth tutorial, phase plant, phase plant tutorial, phase plant sound design, kilohearts, kilohearts phase plant

Id: wqc8rZnzTVI

Length: 23min 41sec (1421 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021