Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: The Yamaha AN1x Synthesizer mailing list

previous by date index next by date
previous in topic topic list next in topic

Subject: Re: [AN1x] Question about FM

From: "buenlimon" <ubro@...>
Date: 2008-10-23

> Searched Wikipedia and found some related link...
>
> A couple of good articles at SOS
>
> http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr00/articles/synthsecrets.htm
>
> http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1997_articles/sep97/synthschool3.html
>

Thank you so much for taking time for this one!!!

Here is actually some very interesting stuff. On that site I found a
couple of additional pages too on the same topic.

Actually there is on this site a lot of pages describing how to
generally synthesize specific waveforms to arrive at defined goals
(synthetic flute, synthetic violin etc.). Very very interesting. I
will have many hours of study on this site.

> Some theory
>
> http://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/snd/fm.html
>
> http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/fmtut.html
>
> and a forum dedicated to the topic

Oh my, this is heavy stuff almost not digestible...

> http://www.soundshock.se/phpBB2/

Thank you for this one. It is a super source!

====

Anyway, I still have a bit problems to understand what it means, when
the AN1x manual explains that you can set VCO1 to "sync" and thus get
a VCO1s synced to VCO1 by a defined interval. This I understand. But
when I play a note I hear only the upper one (VCO1s if it's tuned higher).

A logical way of making a typical FM sound is to use for example VCO1
synced to VCO1s by "12" meaning VCO1s is one octave higher than VCO1,
and then have VCO1s modulate VCO1 through FM and have the "depth" of
this modulation determined through FEV (which is set to another
profile than PEV). This I have tried, but it doesn't sound like I expect.

So by analysing how the DX factory preset is made I see that VCO2 is
used as "source", which probably means "modulator" (is that so???).
Then in "mix" they set VCO1 to "127" and VCO2 to "0" meaning you don't
hear VCO2 at all. So I take it that the only thing VCO2 does in this
situation is to modulate. (Since you can't hear the thing then it must
do something else which must then be modulation, is that so?).
In this case they have set VCO1s synced to "-2" meaning 1 whole tone
under VCO1. Actually you can't really hear this strange setting.
What's going on here?

I am talking about the simplest of all algorithms that exist - two
operators, the one modulating the other. It's just that I seem to not
really get the expected result, or I have misunderstood something in
the manual.