>>1217
Okay, so, That is probably the ugliest and awkward to use FM Synths I've ever seen.
FMDrive is cool, but it's counter intuitive until you know what you're doing.
I would suggest you try out Imageline/FL's Sytrus first, just to wrap your head around what's happening.
So here I'm going to try to rapid-fire everything you need to know about how to make it work.
So, analog synths are Subtractive. This means you take a wave that is a certain shape, and another wave that's another shape, and you stack them up. the result is the points when they are out of phase with eachother cancel out or "subtract" and the result is a new, more complex wave shape. you then use filters to further "subtract" frequencies. In this case, you would have, Oscilators, which generate sounds. those are what make the waves themselves. oscilators. and their output is the sound. you can also adjust those oscilators, with LFO's or Low Frequency Oscilators so the amplitude of the LFO adjusts how much a knob gets adjusted by. This makes the LFO a "modulator" and the original Oscilator a "Carrier"
AM and FM are what happens when your modulator, is another pitched oscilator, meaning that isn't low frequency, it's an audible pitch. In the case of AM or Amplitude modulation, you are effecting the amplitude of a wave at the speed of another wave, which deforms it up and down. In subtractive-synth, AM gets called "ring mod" because it makes a ringing sound, at the frequency of your LFO, which gets cranked up pretty high into the audible range, but isn't note specific.
FM is when you control the pitch of one oscilator, with another. this also distorts the shape of a wave, but in a very different way. This distortion of the original wave creates new and complex harmonics.
So, in FM, they don't call them oscilators any more. They're called "Operators" or OPs. all operators are controlled by the same keyboard. you can re-tune each operator independently, but they will still be keyboard tracked smoothly.
All of these operators can be used as modulators, carriers, or both.
This leads me to Sytrus, which i mentioned before. Other good FM Synths use a simmilar layout, which looks like a square grid of knobs.
On the X axis of this grid of knobs, you have Operator 1-6
and on the Y axis, you have... operator 1-6
and the column on the far right, is your output levels. So if you turn the "output" for operator 1 all the way up, then operator 1, will be audible.
the rows are going from generator, to where they recieve modulation, all the way to the right into the output.
the columns are where a given operator modulates another.
So the 1st ROW left to right, is operator 1 as a carrier
then the 2nd knob, is the amount that Operator 2 is modulating operator 1. because the 2nd knob, is the column, of operator 2.
This makes way more sense looking at it,
Different sounds can be made by using differently shaped operators, using them for different amounts of modulation, at different relative frequencies, and even chaining them so that 1 operator modulates 2, and those modulate the next with those new shapes, and.... all kinds of weirdness can be done.
In this open source DX7 that you posted, it does not use this "patch matrix" grid, the same way. Instead, it has a grid where you select which operator is the output, and then you connect the modulators together in sort of a graph to say what modulates what, and you control the amounts with volume per op, and how much modulation each op can receive, which is really counter-intuitive, but is how all early FM synths where set up, which was a result of hardware limitations that we're not... limited to anymore.
if you can't find a manual for how to FM, then I have one for you.
This is a video playlist that is all about how FM Synthesis works, using real examples, and they're really well made, and they get better over time... THERE ARE A LOT OF THEM! 67 OF THEM! AND THEY'RE ALL LIKE 10+ MINUTES! THAT'S AN AVERAGE OF 670 MINUTES OR ELEVEN HOURS OF TUTORIALS. And that's just FM. This guy just does tutorials constantly. like, 2 tutorials and recording tracks, daily. and at every subscriber milestone he does tutorial requests for how re-creating sounds from other songs and he works out how to do them. he's currently doing the 75K subscribers, and is doing 75 tutorial requests. just... thought you should know. If you're a music producer as hobby or job, and you do electronic music, you should really be subscribed to this guy.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGYoE903Nir5FeFcH7FYkk-r2ZgmgJLjc