 Hey, it's ANFA and you're watching ANFA vlog today. I want to talk about FM synthesis or frequency modulation synthesis We're gonna make some pretty simple but effective sounds and you'll be amazed what you can do with only two sine waves and frequency modulation So here is my arduous session I have already inserted four MIDI tracks with the sense of FX plug-in Okay, so in case you don't know what frequency modulation synthesis is, let's quickly go for the basics I'm going to insert an Oscillator plug-in on the master. It's called C M-Poll Scope stereo Here it is. I'm gonna make it above others Keep it above others so it doesn't disappear Now we're gonna change the time window so you can see more detail maybe enable the trigger The level was okay. The X position could be or maybe let's keep it at the center All right, now so now can we can see the waveform what we're doing and also we can see Frequency content So we can see that now we are producing a single pure tone At about four hundred and sixty Hertz And 40 probably yeah, because that's the middle a And this is a pure tone so Now let's have some fun with Zenit sub FX I'm going to audit the instrument We're using the AdSynth engine By default it has a filter Lopez filter, so I'm going to first disable the velocity sensing and Make it all the way up so it doesn't affect our sound if I were to ramp it down You can see that our sine wave Disappears if it's high enough to be attenuated by the filter and we don't want that So I'm going to open the voice Settings and here We have our oscillator. You can see that if I change it to something like a saw way for example We have all the harmonics odd and even and this is a saw wave Our oscillator confirms I'm going to make this a sine wave again And we're gonna add frequency modulation to this now If you're familiar with the concept of vibrato that is playing a tone but Varying the pitch Cyclically you can see that our sine wave is now wobbling and there are some also This is also some distortion, but it's way below 80 Hertz Way below negative 80 decibels, so it's pretty inaudible and if we Make this smaller Yeah, you can see that our sine wave is stretching however, if I change the frequency of this Oscillation of this change of pitch to make it faster Suddenly it doesn't sound like a sine wave anymore And we don't have a single tone. We have a series of harmonics And that's the basic concept behind frequency modulation. This is called LFO. That means low frequency oscillator So this is used to create changes that are sub harmonic speeds So below 20 Hertz, however, we can make it so fast that it is actually Audible speeds audible frequencies And that's what happens when you do frequency modulation, so I'm going to disable this frequency LFO So we have our simple sine wave again, and I'm going to enable FM modulation, so here's our modulation panel And immediately you can hear that this is not the sine wave and if we zoom in on our oscilloscope This looks more like Arctic monkeys logo than anything And if we ramp the FM depth down, you can see that it's created from the basic sine wave And we have another sine wave used To change the pitch of the first one take a look at the waveform how it changes and take a look at the At the frequency connet how that changes to When I just slowly Increase and if we make it too much We get something that sounds like noise, but it's periodic noise It's a short sample of noise that it's repeating over and over and we have some steady tones Which is very useful because you can do stuff like Bells rings and crash symbols and things using something like that. It's created with the FM synthesis if you pitch this down we're starting to lose the Notion of this thing repeating. However, if you take a look It's still the same sequence repeating over and over. There are patterns here. So this is not noise But it sounds like it. So what's happening now? I have changed the modulating sine wave pitch to four octaves down if I Shift it even lower like eight octaves down. We have vibrato This is exactly the same thing Also funny things happen if we change the pitches Let's now synthesize an electric piano Okay, so that's the basic of frequency modulation synthesis. Let's now scratch this and Make an electric piano sound So I'm going to reset this to zero So we have our basic sine wave Now what electric panel is it's a piano that has strings and hammers However, each string has an electro magnetic transducer like an electric guitar and that captured the sound and It happens so that you can achieve something that sounds very similar We've just a tiny bit Oh, you have this detuned it's no good Let's start over And here is our basic sine wave oscillator you can see that this is exactly what we get on the oscilloscope If I enable this we have multiple types of modulation, I'm gonna pick FM You can see that the waveform slightly resembles a saw wave, but not quite and This sound is pretty close to our basic electric piano tone Can you imagine that this is an electric piano already? however The string when struck with the hammer it loses the high frequency energy faster than the low frequency energy So I'm going to add an envelope that is make this modulating sine wave Change its amplitude along the way and at first we have long attack so We're starting with virtually no modulation and then it goes up if I turn this all the way down We have all the modulation. So this higher level Also, the problem is we have velocity sensing enabled So if I hit the note gently We have less modulation applied than if I hit it hard So I want to disable this and to do it. I have to move this slider all the way up Now it doesn't matter how soft or hard I hit the note It's gonna have the same timber and that's what I like We might restore a little bit of that later to get more life into our electric piano sound But for now, let's have it disabled. It's gonna make it easier for us to program the timber of the sound so I'm going to change the sustained value of the amplitude envelope for the modulating waveform To zero So that it decays with time and this is the decay time So how long does it take for this sound to die off? And remember that we're operating on the modulating sine wave This is the audible sound and this is the sound that influences this sound if I make this longer You can see we have a kind of a naturally softening out waveform It's pretty nice What we can also do is Add a little bit of the frequency envelope to create kind of a click at the beginning of the note So I'm going to enable this And by default it creates a weird Frequency modulated sweep Because the attack value is way down low. So our oscillator starts At a very low frequency and if I change the attack time to be smaller That might give us just what we need But it's still too long You can see we're doing this ramp, but we do it very very quickly. So we just get something like a little click It Might be a little bit too much. So I'm going to make this Amplitude value. Sorry attack value closer to the original one. This is no change It's going from higher to lower That's gonna be good Okay, now we also need to add an amplitude envelope to the Carrier waveform So I'm going to enable it here And do the same thing. We need it to start off quickly. So the attack time is all the way down The sustained value is also all the way down and now the decay time changes How long our waveform is going to take To get to silence I'd say that sounds pretty natural Maybe this is a little bit too slow still Finally we could add a little filter We could go the one level up So I'm gonna close this dialogue and here we have the global settings where we have the global filter the global amplitude envelope Etc. We were messing only with the first voice. We have eight of these voices there But we can change I'm gonna maybe Use some of that Lopez filter To make our sound dollar even dollar And I'm gonna use this filter envelope and it changes starting the attack value all the way up So we have a bright sound and then in the case Well, that's too fast that's nice you can also reduce the cue if I make it higher You'll have a resonance peak Sweeping through a spectrum But we don't want that we just we want this to be rather gentle and unnoticeable To sound as much natural as possible What else we can do to make it a little bit more interesting is play around with the pitches So I'm going to slightly very very slightly detune The modulating waveform So you have a little bit of a Vibration because they don't match in frequency perfectly if we take a look at the spectrum the fundamental frequency is pulsating That also is a very very dry sound So we're gonna need to add some reverb to make it more believable and also more usable in a musical context But something else I can do is add a little bit of harmonic content to this modulating waveform However, if I do this right now It's quickly gonna be a little bit too much just some random harmonics Maybe let's try shifting them in the face This is a very simple sound. However Adding my new detail Can make it more believable Now this is way too much So I'm going to change the magnitude type from linear to negative 60 decibels And this is make gonna make these sliders much more Sensitive so I can input much lower values We can also We could also use Some randomization to make the harmonics quieter and lower louder for different notes. So every time you hit a note These values are randomly changed around basically some harmonics are attenuated that gonna give you a little bit Different sound every time you hit the key so that might give you more realistic results However, the fundamental might be affected a lot. So let's just try it out Oh, yeah Gonna make it. It's not very very very much I don't hear a much difference. However, we can break our sound easily making it Go out of control. So I don't want that Alright, so what's left to finish this sound off is just add some reverb maybe add a little bit of tape saturation to simulate the overdrive of the transducers inside the electric piano because every single string or Maybe that's a string but a bar vibrating bar Has its own transducer and if you had a note hard, it's gonna distort on this transducer So you can play with distortion right now. We are distorting a little bit on the master because I have cranked this Instance as an effects way up. I'm gonna maybe turn it down and let's Go to insertion effects It's insert an effect to the part one which is the first one we're using Let's do distortion. Well, that's a lot When it's something very very subtle Let's go low For some reason it sounds quite dull Let's make it half half dry so half undistorted and half wet so distorted signal and Finally, let's add some reverb Well, that's too much Let's hype as the signal. So maybe let's listen to adjust the reverb We have a lot of initial delay Sometimes called pre-delay Let's make this shorter and also make the simulated room smaller I Would also go in with an EQ try to give it some more brightness because the sound is pretty Pretty low frequency intensive or low mid Let's give it some brightness with a high-shell filter Make it gentle. Okay. We're distorting Master bus, okay, so this is our electric piano. Let's go in with another sound I'm gonna just rename this to electric piano Electric bass Let's open up the instrument And we have our familiar simple sine wave Let's make it louder I'm going to Shift the sound to octaves down So this is the key shift for this part So I'm pressing the same key but it sounds to octaves down, which is nice because what I want to make this a sound of bass I'm going to again Rump up the Lopez filter so it doesn't interfere with our timber I'm going to enable frequency modulation again Make it very very subtle. Let's take a look at our waveform Maybe I'll change the level if I now Shift this Simple modulating sine wave one octave down. We're gonna get a different waveform And that's a little bit too much of the modulation. I'm going to disable the velocity sensing Make this more subtle And it reminds me of an electric bass Bass Well, that's the base of our electric bass sound which is extremely simple We just pitched the modulating waveform one octave down and we're very subtle amount of the modulation we have very nice Sound that is very fat And so it's so simple also we're gonna enable the amplitude envelope for the modulating waveform so we can have this Lose the harmonics over time You can see our sound is getting more focused on the Fundamental the funny thing is if you take a look especially if I pitch it up That fundamental is in the center But we're getting subharmonics Because of this modulation is why the sound is so fat Why it sounds so fat as a bass Because we get harmonics below the fundamental or so it's funny. It's actually shifting our fundamental down We Need to make the sound monophonic because right now we can play a chord and that doesn't make sound doesn't make sense For a bass instrument, so I'm gonna make this mono Now if I press one note and press another I'm gonna hear only one note at a time, which is very cool. You can also use the portamento feature to get ourselves a pitch slide That might be useful for some performance Here in the controllers window. We can also change the portamento parameters. So at the time If we make it very very quick, we can't we can't even hear it if we get very long Well, it's totally overwhelming our sound so that's not good There's also the threshold Of half tones. So right now it the portamento won't occur unless we play notes that are free semi tones apart Make this very very long You can see I'm hitting C and then D There's no portamento if I hit C and then E We get this ramp. So this is basically a filter. We can make this all the way down To enable portamento for all notes or until worlds C and D C and C sharp And I usually do that you can also invert this threshold and that will mean that only intervals below a certain one So now I'm getting C and F and C and E so now everything lower than Four semitones apart will have portamento and everything higher won't Well, that's up to you, but it's good to know that that these options are there Maybe it's gonna make sense for the two semitone thing Because you can you know shift your finger on the fretboard instead of just you know picking and a note So that might make sense Okay Let's add a little click to our electric bass again. Let's try to do this with the frequency envelope Let's also make the whole thing louder I Wonder if we can make this a sound like a slap bass that's probably not gonna happen. Let's remember 51 So it is kind of sounding like a more heavily struck bass But I'm gonna go down with the simpler one Let's also try all a bit of saturation For it so insertion effects part one distortion Well, that's radical Now We don't we know it needs stereo, but here is a Lopez filter and the hypers filter And we can apply it after the distortion, which is by default or before the distortion so we can Filter out the bass and distort only the higher frequencies Then we can mix them back to the original signal So we're actually doing exciting Yeah, that's how exciters work. They distort the signal filter out the lows and mix this back to the original signal We get quite a lot of noise and that's probably because of the nuts of effects is FM synthesis engine that has I heard it has a lot of aliasing in it That's to be re-hauled someday, but most of the time it's not a problem Okay, so that's our bass Let's go in with another sound and make a Formant screamer growl, okay, let's call this growl No, we have our basic sound wave. Let's make this louder and Same thing however this time we're gonna make it slightly different. I'm going to of course Make this all the way up in the sable velocity sensing So we have all the high frequency content we can get now We're gonna approach frequency modulation in a different way that gives us way more possibilities and That will also allow us to do some pretty cool performance Because before we were using this modulator and it's built in oscillator. However, we can use a different voice as our modulator Because of the way that sense of x is created. It's now only possible to modulate voices of Higher numbers like the voice to with the lower numbers. So with like with the voice one So this voice one is going to become our modulating waveform So I'm gonna make it all the way down to zero. So it's not audible. I can play Nothing sounds can make it louder. It is there Now I hit the note nothing is there and I'm going to enable the second voice Which has the volume on enabled and I'm going to enable frequency modulation and pick external modulator one which is This voice That's harsh now if I Tamed it down You can see that we don't have all the controls of this one because we are not using this oscillator and It's settings, but we have an additional amplitude envelope That sounds like a classic FM Sweep like something that you would get from an ad lib sound card or something. I Think this is how they made brass instruments with DX7 or Yeah, if you're into retro sounds using FM with only sine waves is a good re-sign because the earliest FM synthesizers only operated on sine waves and Technically it was phase modulation So PM and they are slightly different but with sound waves You don't really see any difference only the phase of the output signal is different if I if I'm not if I'm correct But Yamaha DX7 only had sine waves and modern FM synthesizers like FM 8 there's a lot of effects helm Aux FM synth and others have various wave forms so we can use a Triangle wave And it's gonna give us a different result Pulse wave it started getting back. Let's get back to sine wave So yeah However, we're gonna make something vastly different so I'm going to pitch our Carrier waveform so the sad so the oscillator that we're actually going to hear way down I'm going to disable the sample to do the envelope I'm gonna pitch this one up and we're gonna play with the tuning Yeah, so we have just two sine waves one frequency modulating another one and They are seven octaves apart Now eight. That's too much. I guess as you can see in the spectrum. That's quite an interesting thing happening there Take a look at the oscillator oscilloscope Waveform is wild. I'm looking for a vocal like formant sound. I think it's it. That's it. Yeah Yeah, we have velocity sensing so every time I hit a key it sounds different so I'm gonna disable this Now we have the maximum I Think it's a little bit too much. You can see I'm switching between the voices one and two constantly To change the amount of modulation Now if we could Somehow control the pitch or the detuning of this modulating waveform modulating operator voice and we could make ourselves this funky vocal growl sound We can do this The answer is the pitch wheel however, right now it's way too much and I'm going to get back to the To the main window go to controllers and here you can see we have the pitch wheel band range and it's 200 cents So it's two semitones You can use these big arrows to make it zero Nothing and now I can make it one We have a little change we can make it five cents Maybe 15 is gonna be good. Yeah, maybe even 20 Now the problem is We're changing the pitch of the modulating waveform and also of the modulated waveform the carrier one So I'm going to close this We have the voice one which is modulating and voice to which is the carrier and here we have a little bend Knob and that changes the amount of the pitch wheel That is applied to this voice if I turn this all the way down This oscillator is ignoring the pitch wheel This isn't right Now I think we could add a sub Oscillator for proper bass tone But we need to disable the band we could also have some fun and distort this thing We could also do one thing and that is high pass the this voice so it doesn't give us detuned fundamental frequencies Detuned bass frequencies. I think we have a little bit too much of the distortion and it Masks the the formant thing We had Lopez filter on in the overdrive and the distortion unit I think it's better now Yeah Let's now maybe Make a simple kick drum and make a little track with these three sounds Let's give it a go I'm going to enable MIDI input For this gonna call it kick Kick gonna make this voice louder Pitch it to octaves down add a frequency envelope and amplitude envelope So the sound decays quickly to silence And that's our super basic kick drum I can distort it and that's a me cue with a High pass resonating filter resonant filter So we're gonna get rid of Of the low frequencies we don't want and also it's accentuate Low frequencies the low frequencies we want. Oh, it's distorting on the master channel. That's not nice We can also add a high shelf filter to restore some highs We have a kick drum Now let's put some notes in I'm going to Have tempo 120 that will be good Let's put D to draw gonna put some Oh, I think I need grid Yeah That would be good to have a grid Does it play? Yo It does Let's duplicate this shift D is the key 15 times so we have 16 total 16 times And now Let's just jam Three two one go That's our electric piano line not too fancy I got some extras that means the system wasn't able to keep up and probably lost some samples But for me to recording that doesn't Mean anything like you don't run into problems with this. Let's record the electric bass Now that's not the bass to bass line I never made the bass line so quickly so that Brother sucks Now let's record a growl and the good thing is we can record the pitch bend action, I mean the pitch wheel and I'm going to show you this when we open this a Menu for automation. We have bender Let's go for channel one because we have 16 midi channels and now we can see The pitch bend motion and automation that is recorded Inside the midi regions. So if I just hit record now No, we couldn't see it as I was recording but now you can see The motion of the pitch bend if we right click here We can change the mode to line near and that will interpolate between every sample So we have more resolution. That's probably Well, that's way too loud Oh, it sounds really crappy But it's pretty amazing what you can do with just sine waves and frequency modulation like You would think that you couldn't get so much frequency content And so widely different sound with just sine waves the kick is also just a sine wave With a pitch bend with a pitch envelope going from up to down Sine waves are awesome and frequency modulation is awesome, too So that's it for today. I hope you've learned something This was kind of a basic introduction to FM synthesis using Xenots of FX I hope you liked it. You can download the session. There is nothing super funky, but if you want to play around with it you can it's created with arbor 5.11 And Well, if you have any questions about this topic or other things and suggestions about what I should do in the next episodes Please leave them in the comment section below. I also want to make the big shout out to new patrons on patreon.com Who support me since the recent video and these are amadeus for lego not 101 see the machik And also linux muso. I want to say big thanks to you guys You're making this show possible if you want to see more videos like this consider subscribing on patreon because that can ultimately Allow me to do this as a halftime or maybe even a full-time job That would be truly fantastic. That would be the best job ever Anyway, I'm getting back to finishing the album that I'm going to release later this year And I hope it's going to blow your socks off Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye Dude, I have five patrons And I hope you enjoyed this video if you liked it you can Leave a comment or something frequency modulation and pick external modulation modulate external modulator one