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Programming FM, Part 1: Basic Pad Sound
[Links within the text (yellow) indicate sound files to help you follow along.]
Okay, the goal here is to go from an initialized FM patch -- a single sine operator -- to this pad sound:
http://jbj.raceriv.com/sounds/patch...soaring-pad.mp3
I will show you how to do it using Native Instruments' FM7. 
The first step is to open up FM7 in your DAW and initialize a patch -- you can do this by clicking "Init Edit Buffer" in the "Library" tab. After you've done that, you can load this MIDI file into your sequencer:
http://jbj.raceriv.com/sounds/patches/pad-midi.mid
Set your sequencer to loop and click "play." You should hear sine waves (plain "beeps") playing a sequence of four chords. Not too exciting, right? Let's get to work on crafting a more interesting sound...
The first thing we'll do for our pad is to give it the dynamic (volume) characteristics of a pad. You'll notice that the default sine wave sound starts abruptly and ends abruptly; not very pad-like. To change that, click on the tab for Operator F. When you do, you'll see a box with "Envelope" written above it that looks like this:
This little graph indicates Operator F's volume behavior over time. You can move the little squares on the graph by clicking and dragging them; drag the upper-left square and lower-right square until they look something like this:
It sounds a bit different now. What did you just do? You made the operator's volume increase more slowly at the start of a note and decrease more gradually at the end of a note -- or in synth programming terms, you gave it a "slower attack" and "longer release."
Okay, now the volume behavior sounds more like a pad, but it's still just a boring sine wave! Let's change that as well. Near the upper-right of the envelope box, you'll see a label that says "Matrix." Click on it, and you should see something that looks like this:
This is the real heart of programming FM7: the Matrix allows you to route operators to each other, into filter and saturation effects, and even back into themselves. The last ability is the one that we're going to use right now. In the Matrix, you'll see a box with an "F" in it; this represents Operator F. Click on the little brown box directly above the "F" box, and drag up a bit. You should see something like this:
It should sound a bit different, sort of like a saw wave with a low pass filter on it. What you've just done is feed Operator F back into itself -- this adds some higher frequencies to the sound, increasing its complexity. For now, keep the feedback number around 26, and click on the tab for Operator E.
The first thing you can do for Operator E is just turn it on. After you've done that, look at the "Ratio" control on the left side of FM7. This determines how high the frequency of the operator will be. Our sound could use a little more high end, so click on the left "up" arrow on the ratio control until the red number reads "3.0000."
Doesn't sound any different, right? That's because Operator E isn't yet routed to the "Out" control in the Matrix. To do this, imagine a line descending downward from the "E" box in the Matrix and a line moving leftward from the "Out" label: click on the brown box where these two lines would intersect, and drag up. You should get something like this:
You should now hear a higher sound; it's just a plain sine wave at the moment. But you already know how to change that: click and drag on the box above "E," until you have it sounding more like a saw. 28 is a pretty good value for the feedback level. But another element needs changing, too: operator E is starting and stopping abruptly. You also know how to change this: click on the "envelope" label on the right side of FM7, and then give operator E's envelope a similar shape to the one you gave operator F.
Now that you've done that, it should be sounding a bit better. But it's still too thin and "metallic" sounding, so we'll fatten it up with some unison. To do that, click on the "Master" tab. You should see the unison control in the center of the screen. Increase the number of voices to at least 18; this will ensure that you can play at least a few notes at once with full unison. Increase the number of "unison voices" to 6. And put the "unison detune" at 50 or slightly below. What's happening now is that, for every note, the synth is playing six "voices" at slightly different pitches. Sounds a little fuller, right?
Effects can be very helpful in getting a nice pad sound, so that's what we'll do next. The "Effect" control is just to the right of the unison control. Click both the "Effect On / Off" box and the "Tempo Sync" box. This should make it sound slightly "wet," but doesn't really give a sense of spaciousness yet. So increase the "time" control to around 72, put the "Feedback" at about 31, and "Diffusion" at 27. Feedback increases the number of times that the delayed sound will play, diffusion increases its stereo spread. After all these slider modifications, your Master tab should look something like this:
Starting to sound quite a bit like the first mp3 file, right? Now what we can do is brighten up the sound sound some more, give it more of an edge. Click on one of the Operator tabs (doesn't really matter which one) and access the Matrix just as before. Play with the feedback on the boxes above "F" and "E." You'll notice that if you increase the feedback very much above 50, you'll start getting a "noisy" sound in addition to the sawish one -- you can adjust that to your taste, but I like to keep it around 50.
If you were able to follow all the steps so far, you should have the basic sound from the original mp3 file. What you do with it now is up to you. One thing you could try to do is make it even thicker by adding another operator to the mix at a ratio of 2 (or some other ratio). Whatever you decide to do, I hope you found this little walkthrough to be useful.
Here is the sound's transformation throughout this tutorial recorded in a single file: http://jbj.raceriv.com/sounds/tutorials/sequence.mp3
Last edited by MrJiveBoJingles on Mar-07-2009 at 20:35
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