It’s about instrument making. I recently had a conversation with Jamie from GEOSynths. He asked me how I manage to create hundreds of sounds. Over and over again. He was amazed at the quantity, because he said it takes quite a long time to create just one sound. Sometimes half an hour or even a whole hour. So what’s the trick with me? I told him that it is passion and the constant desire to create sounds. But that was only half the truth, and I’m writing the whole truth here.
I work with a system, that’s the trick. And that’s particularly important with FM synthesis. There are so many possibilities here that you constantly have to decide on something so that you don’t get bogged down or hopelessly lost in the jungle of parameters. So, apart from a few exceptions, a system helps with the basic approach. This makes FM Synthesis really quick and easy. Anyone can come up with their own system, but I’ll give you a practical example: Instrument making. This fits in with FM Synthesis, because you already quickly realized with the DX7 that it is suitable for simulating normal instruments. There are reasons for this, including the dynamic possibilities. Also the fine tuning when generating the desired sound characteristics of the waveforms. Well, let’s take a closer look at this.
At one point in the DX7 manual, the author used the example of a clarinet to illustrate how to create a suitable waveform with FM Synthesis. At the time, this seemed pretty banal to me, as I wanted to create great pads, crisp basses and fat lead sounds with it. That’s what I did, but the idea of using the clarinet as a role model for the approach isn’t wrong at all. Why? Well, the sound of an acoustic musical instrument consists of several components, I’ll call them elements here. And we usually have four of them. There can also be three, maybe even six, it depends on the case. Let’s stick with four for now. And since we’re talking about FM Synthesis, the various algorithms come to mind. How good, because that’s exactly what we need here. For four components that make up a synthetic instrument.
Let’s stay with the wind instrument for this example. First there is the tone attack. Blown gently or with pressure. I call this the flower. It is a very brief moment, our hearing reacts strongly to the beginning of a sound. So well that we can usually immediately identify the instrument in question. It is also always characteristic of the instrument in the overall context. When choosing the type of algorithm, we like to create this sound with an own small operator stack. Usually two are sufficient, sometimes more are needed. I refer to the rest of the sound as the body or core. The waveform and the harmonic overtone spectrum play the central role here. While a note is held, i.e. the sustain phase, this is what we get to hear. The essential thing, i.e. whether the tone sounds hollow, sharp, soft, penetrating, narrow, biting and so on. This is often one operator stack, but there can also be two or three or more, depending on the desired sound complexity.
This is followed by the third element: Modulation, i.e. the movement of the sound over time. This can take place automatically, for example with an LFO, or dynamically and only when required via controller and velocity. This brings the sound to life, just like an acoustic instrument.
And the fourth element? This is the release phase of the sound. Does it end abruptly? Does it gradually fade away? Or can you have both by temporarily calling up this release phase using the damper pedal, just like on a piano? So we decide whether there should be flowing tone transitions for legato passages effects and where this should not be the case. But release the key, tone away. Pause, no matter how long it lasts. So musically this is important for the composition. The rest, and this would be an optional fifth element, is the icing by means of an effect and the room in which the sound is placed.
The four elements therefore have a connection to life, because they come into existence at the beginning of the sound, continue with their vitality and express what the musician lives and wants to say, stand in a room, therefore exist, and after the key is released the sound fades away and disappear into nothingness.
Is this text a tutorial on how to create sounds with FM Synthesis? No, not really. It’s an explanation of how to systematically and quickly create own FM sounds. The example can be varied with more or fewer elements. And it can be extended to all kinds of sounds, because even soundscapes can be built up using such a systematic approach. And it all happens really quickly if you approach it systematically. That’s good, nothing is more annoying and disruptive to musical creativity than sound programming that drags on forever.
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