KVR Audio

kilon · Post by **kilon** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 10:50 am

My best fm synth is Wladorf Blofeld so far. It is a hardware synth , it can do wavetables , fm and fm on the wavetables, more than 100+ parameters to tweak and the most flexible mod matrix I have used. Simple and yet so complex. Thin and yet so Fat. A real Chameleon.

Here is a track I made with it , it is 100% blofeld. All the presets are tweaked.

Rangtangtang · Post by **Rangtangtang** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 10:59 am

living sounds wrote:
tony tony chopper wrote:how sad that this thread is now at a point where FM synths are having their audio quality debated like analog synths. If you let things slip in that direction, soon you will hear bs like 'nothing beats a good old analog FM synth' & everyone will agree on that.
Currently that's where we are. Nothing beats the old digital FM synth (the DX7) for sound quality. VOPM has that sound quality as well, but it's lacking the complexity of the 6-operator synthesis. To my ears there's something severely wrong in terms of sound with a great number of plugins, and someone has to get to the root of it. VOPM shows that it should be possible to get the same (if not better, since you can go up in sampling rate and avoid the converters) quality ITB.

Yamaha DX is not analog, its 8 bit digital. It is an early rom or sampler and not even every note either. So there! Ninja is probably the closest to the Yamaha DX I have heard and its actualy better.

Aroused by JarJar · Post by **Aroused by JarJar** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 11:06 am

Rangtangtang wrote:
living sounds wrote:
tony tony chopper wrote:how sad that this thread is now at a point where FM synths are having their audio quality debated like analog synths. If you let things slip in that direction, soon you will hear bs like 'nothing beats a good old analog FM synth' & everyone will agree on that.
Currently that's where we are. Nothing beats the old digital FM synth (the DX7) for sound quality. VOPM has that sound quality as well, but it's lacking the complexity of the 6-operator synthesis. To my ears there's something severely wrong in terms of sound with a great number of plugins, and someone has to get to the root of it. VOPM shows that it should be possible to get the same (if not better, since you can go up in sampling rate and avoid the converters) quality ITB.
Yamaha DX is not analog, its 8 bit digital. It is an early rom or sampler and not even every note either. So there! Ninja is probably the closest to the Yamaha DX I have heard and its actualy better.

Whoops. The DX and TX synths aren't ROMplers or samplers, they are phase modulation synthesizers, and they started at 12-bit then went to 16-bit a little later.

tony tony chopper · Post by **tony tony chopper** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 11:13 am

(note that the shapes were in a ROM)

Aroused by JarJar · Post by **Aroused by JarJar** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 11:18 am

living sounds wrote:You can't really work against the overall tone of a synth. If it doesn't sound tight by itself, no amount of programming will make it sound that way.

I agree. But this has nothing at all to do with analog vs. digital or hardware vs. software, whatsoever.

Of course you actually *can* "polish a turd", or make a silk purse out of a sow's ear or whatever, but the processing required kind of begs the question of what instruments are actually being heard.

Aroused by JarJar · Post by **Aroused by JarJar** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 11:27 am

tony tony chopper wrote:(note that the shapes were in a ROM)

Sure, but it's a whole different ball of wax reading off sines and envelopes and working from there than reading off entire complex waveforms (as you already know of course but not to mislead onlookers). And of course the relative crudeness of the source sines is one reason why the old hardware FM synths are NOT the best phase modulation tools after all.

tony tony chopper · Post by **tony tony chopper** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 11:59 am

Sure, but it's a whole different ball of wax reading off sines and envelopes and working from there than reading off entire complex waveforms

Sure but it's important to mention because the ones who claim nothing sounds like those old things, have to know that the shapes were in ROM, and weren't exactly like their names.
This lists the OPL3 shapes, and only the sine is really a (quantized) sine.
http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~arnost/opl/opl3.html#reg01
..so they have to create or load those shapes in some way into the target synth.
I'm interested in those shapes as wav files btw, if someone owns the OPL3 ones.

I mean: those who make claims about the synths out there, have they made their possible to adapt the same data? I doubt. They quickly tried, and quickly made assumptions.

Btw, the OPL2/3 also had a special drum mode, were some voices were used for drums. Those are probably not doable in most FM synths, they were really special (but noisy crap so who cares).

Aroused by JarJar · Post by **Aroused by JarJar** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 12:14 pm

tony tony chopper wrote:
Sure, but it's a whole different ball of wax reading off sines and envelopes and working from there than reading off entire complex waveforms
Sure but it's important to mention because the ones who claim nothing sounds like those old things, have to know that the shapes were in ROM, and weren't exactly like their names.
This lists the OPL3 shapes, and only the sine is really a (quantized) sine.
http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~arnost/opl/opl3.html#reg01
..so they have to create or load those shapes in some way into the target synth.
I'm interested in those shapes as wav files btw, if someone owns the OPL3 ones.

I mean: those who make claims about the synths out there, have they made their possible to adapt the same data? I doubt. They quickly tried, and quickly made assumptions.

Good point. I don't think emulating Yamaha FMs is a very interesting idea to tell the truth, but you're quite right, if you're going to emulate you've got to actually do it.

living sounds · Post by **living sounds** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 1:40 pm

Aroused by JarJar wrote:
I agree. But this has nothing at all to do with analog vs. digital or hardware vs. software, whatsoever.

Of course you actually *can* "polish a turd", or make a silk purse out of a sow's ear or whatever, but the processing required kind of begs the question of what instruments are actually being heard.

In this case it really hasn't anything to do with analog vs. digital (going by all I know about the DX7 at least). It's in the algorithm.

But you can only polish a turd so far. You can't fix blurred highs, a weak bass, distortion, lack of transient etc. with any processing. And starting out with great source sounds tracks mix themselves really. You can get to decent if you really work hard, but it's never turn out great.

tony tony chopper · Post by **tony tony chopper** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 1:53 pm

a weak bass

if there's a 'weak bass' in a FM synth preset compared to another FM synth preset, it's *your fault* as a preset designer, and it is 100% doable to have the same 'bass' in both

living sounds · Post by **living sounds** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 1:57 pm

tony tony chopper wrote:
a weak bass
if there's a 'weak bass' in a FM synth preset compared to another FM synth preset, it's *your fault* as a preset designer, and it is 100% doable to have the same 'bass' in both

In theory, yes. But only if both used the same algorithms. Which doesn't seem to be the case.

tony tony chopper · Post by **tony tony chopper** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 2:02 pm

Which doesn't seem to be the case.

it is the case

living sounds · Post by **living sounds** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 2:04 pm

tony tony chopper wrote:
Which doesn't seem to be the case.
it is the case

What synths are you talking about? The DX7 and FM7?

tony tony chopper · Post by **tony tony chopper** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 2:10 pm

all of them, unless broken, unless too limited in their op algorithms (but FM7, Sytrus & others allow any possible op algo)

envelopes matter, if you really want to replicate those of old crap you will need the freedom of multipoint envelopes

Aroused by JarJar · Post by **Aroused by JarJar** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 2:13 pm

living sounds wrote: But you can only polish a turd so far. You can't fix blurred highs, a weak bass, distortion, lack of transient etc. with any processing. And starting out with great source sounds tracks mix themselves really. You can get to decent if you really work hard, but it's never turn out great.

Certainly, that's what I was saying- you can just mask and blur downright replace to the point where you've really synthesized a new sound. But there is no substitute for a good sound from the get-go.

living sounds wrote:
Aroused by JarJar wrote:
I agree. But this has nothing at all to do with analog vs. digital or hardware vs. software, whatsoever.
In this case it really hasn't anything to do with analog vs. digital (by all I know about the DX7 at least). It's in the algorithm.

But it's not just the algorithms, otherwise there would be many spot-on emulations. Most synthesis stuff is really basically extremely simple- like "+" and "*", and trigonometry 101, really. It's the implementation and all the little things going on.

I know very well "that sound" you talk about, and I agree that it is rare in software. But the main thing with digital synths in general and software synths particularly is still performance/cost limitations, and that's the fault of the market, not developers. Even after more than 10 years of working with software synths (and acoustic and analog is still my thing), what do I find on the forums when I do come across software that sounds good to me? "...but it's a CPU hog..."

Well yeah. If you view the universe as quantized, even the simplest analog synthesizer is working with an astronomical amount of data, so there you go.

The Fight for FM