 Hello, Ocellator Sync here. At the start of the year I put out my third patch pack for the Volcro FM which was called FM Does Analog and I just wanted to start off this video by saying thank you so much guys for checking out those patches and for the really lovely feedback you've been getting and especially to those of you out there who have been using these patches in your jams like as I mentioned in that video it just gives me such a buzz to see the patches getting used so yeah if you are out there using them make sure you are tagging me in the videos or on Instagram or whatever I'm just at Ocellator Sync on most stuff I just can't thank you enough for checking the patches out and using them. Now with that in mind while I was making the patches there were a couple of techniques that I kept on coming back to to try and get that sort of analog character in the FM mold so what I want to do in this video with you is share with you my three top tips for getting analog characteristics into your FM patches so without further ado on with tip number one now as we know FM is a digital form of synthesis it's basically mathematical algorithms and what that means is as long as the digital processor can keep up with the maths we can do whatever we want so that means that we can make things happen very very fast we can make things very very extreme harmonically and as long as that the processor is keeping up with the maths you know we can do it and when the processor can't keep up with the maths the aliasing and digital artifacts that coming are quite sort of distinctive and hard and contribute to that kind of what we kind of sometimes talk about that digital hardness. On the other hand analog electronics are really inefficient and kind of crummy and slow but the thing is that crummy slowness is kind of what we like about them things happen comparatively gradually we can't generate as much harmonic content especially in the upper part of the the frequency spectrum and when analog electronics can't keep up they slew and they they gradually move into a type of distortion which is very pleasing to us what that means in practice when we're putting together patches in FM when we want to make them sound analog is that if we go in all guns blazing and we have all of the numbers very high we're going to be creating very extreme sounds that are very characteristically digital if we want to create something more analog sounding we have to approach the program with a little bit more nuance and try and keep away from the upper ends the extremes of all of the parameters and moderate ourselves and bring them a bit closer to the center. So let's take a look at how we might approach that so I've got in this patch here a really sort of characteristically FM sound by the way I will put the starting points for all these patches as shareable patch links in the description of this video if you want to play along at home so let's take a look at this patch as it stands. Okay so I've kind of gone out my way to create as much of a FM sounding patch as I possibly can and and really there's not a lot that's clever going on here but what you will notice is that in a lot of cases a lot of these sliders are right up near the top so stuff like our off-way to output level our envelopes tend to be towards the extremes although this frequency course here hasn't turned up that high that's kind of fairly high in its way so this is actually algorithm five which means we've essentially got three voices going on at once so I'm just going to turn off two of those voices and we'll just listen to operator one and two so again really really super FM right so what can we do to try and make this a little bit more analog sounding so first thing we can talk about is this frequency control in almost all the patches that I put together when I was setting up my modulators so operator two is modulating operator one my course would be pretty close to where the operator for the carrier was if not indeed lower in a lot of cases okay so immediately that is a that's more of an analog kind of sound but there's still probably too much harmonic content going on there and it may not sound it at this point but this is something I kept coming back to is that your modulator levels really do need to be more chilled out okay so that's a more mellow kind of analog sound what's next well the next thing to talk about is our envelopes so when we talk about a snappy envelope on our log synth FM laughs in the face of that idea because FM can really get ridiculously snappy and when we have our right here at 90 it's just just too fast if you listen to the attack of this it's almost unnaturally fast now in my experience in general anything between about 70 and 90 will perceive as more or less an instant onset it's a bit softer now still feels instant but it's softer and we can perhaps do the same with our modulator as well so slow down a bit and same on our release as well we need to be a little bit more conservative still on our release so maybe go around six dish so that's a lot more sort of analog and chilled and we can kind of take the same similar sort of approaches with our other operators to get them closer to something that we might consider a bit more analog and we'll slow down these envelopes by lowering our rates maybe a little bit more harmonic content there there we go you can really remember what that first bit is and maybe at this point we can say well hey let's layer that sort of analog sound with the FM sound but in this video let's bring things down a bit you'll also probably find that there are certain frequencies which frequency relationships which will sound more analog as well so let's get this and just slow it down a bit on here as well obviously this is a very different patch to the one that we started out with but it is also a lot sort of more mellow and analog sounding the other thing that you might find in these cases is that actually how far you jump on your envelopes can make things sound a bit unnatural as well so here we're jumping not that fast but we're jumping quite a way down on our level so we might find that actually we get a more natural sound especially on our modulators if we don't actually jump down as far as well all of these little tweaks kind of helps contribute to a more rounded kind of analog kind of sound however at the moment it doesn't sound like super analog that's because there are some other tricks that we might want to apply which brings me on to tip number two so this tip is all about introducing wobble now FM synths as we mentioned algorithmic digital and because of that sort of mathematical background they're also very very stable and reproducible you know maths doesn't start to break down very easily and one plus one is always two and and pretty much every time that you hit a key on an FM synth presuming that the patch hasn't changed you're going to get that same sort of sound coming out it's very very stable and reproducible on the other hand analog synths with their VCOs their voltage controlled oscillators they're actually inherently pretty unstable even the ones that are very well designed are going to be affected by the way that there might be fluctuations in the electricity supply or or by temperature possibly even by humidity in some cases and all of those sort of changes create these subtle drifts between the VCOs which means that even two VCOs which start out being perfectly in tune will slightly detune from each other and they're slightly detuned from each other at different rates and it creates this instability within the sound which means that every time we hit the key it's not really the same sound now that sounds like it's a dis against analog synths and it's a massive amount of praise for FM synths but in a way it's kind of the opposite the human ear doesn't really like that strict repetition the human ear likes variation it doesn't like to hear this sort of unnatural precise repetition because that doesn't really exist in nature so what we want to do with this trick is we want to create that sort of subtle detuning and wobble that kind of equates to sort of warmth and interest on our analog synths so i've got this little patch here it's a little pad let's take a listen okay so at the moment we are working with algorithm four which is kind of two towers of operators two carriers one and four and then you've got a modulator for each of those and then a modulator modulating the modulator now the fact that we've got multiple modulators feeding into a single carrier is important we'll come to that in just a second but let's talk about wobble now obviously we've got an LFO here and we can apply a bit of pitch modulation which is going to create this wobble in our in our patch and that's it's kind of nice and it's kind of contributed a bit of sort of interest and warmth but the thing that's happening here is that both of our operators that are making up the sound are being wobbled by the same amount at the same time which means that there's not this interaction happening between the two operators so we'll come back to the pitch modulation because we can use it on top of what we're going to talk about here so the next thing that we could talk about maybe is straight up detune also we have this detune parameter on our operators so perhaps if we detune one of our carriers we've gained a certain richness and we could probably even take it further and start introducing fine tune to really get some some beating and movement happening and that's pretty cool but again this amount of detune is not changing over time so although we're getting that beating and richness happening within our patch it's not a dynamic sound what we want to do is introduce a dynamic sound so that the detuning is not consistent between the two voices of our patch so I mentioned earlier that we've got these sort of twin towers of operators at the moment I've got operator three and operator six turned off operator two is creating our sort of harmonic interest as is operator five so here's something that we can do with operator three so you can see here that my operator mode is fixed so what this means is that rather than the frequency of the operator changing as we play different notes on the keyboard this operator is going to sit and oscillate at the same frequency or to put it another way this is an LFO or rather it's an LFO if we have our course frequency turned down far enough as you turn it up it becomes introduces FM but it's fixed FM which is a useful effect but what I'm interested in here is okay well let's set this to an LFO so if we've got an operator here that's acting as an LFO and we're talking about frequency modulation and it's feeding to operator two what we're going to get here is a slow detuning of operator two so this is a pitch LFO that's only being affecting one of our two voices so if we turn on operator three now can you hear how that's quite different to the effect that we had when all we were doing was adding detune to our carriers or indeed fine frequency tweaks that's not the same sound each time that's subtly evolving as we go on now as it happens I've also done the same trick here on operator six which is at the top of our other tower of operators again fixed but what's crucial here is that I've also set it to a different frequency so this means that the drift on our two operators are happening at different frequencies which means that that relationship gets even more complex so let's take a listen to what that sounds like cool right now when we're using our operators our modulators in this way with the fixed mode here and we're using them as pitch LFOs the operator output level is essentially our LFO depth if you like so if we turn this all the way down we end up having with one of our operators getting modulated as we turn it up we start to get more and more wobble happening and we can push this and get a bit seasick and you kind of start to get this chorusing and phasing that you can't really get any other way now if you're feeling particularly sassy you can even turn on your pitch LFO and get three layers of this pitch drift and get these very complicated rich wobbly sounds happening now one other little trick that I wanted to point out with this technique because I use this one of the patches possibly more than one but there's certainly one patch in in particular the patch in the FM Design Lock patch called Uno Bass I do this trick I think it's probably the same setup here with the two towers of operators if you look here on operator three which is essentially our spare LFO I've actually got the key velocity sense turned up and similarly here on operator six and that means that I can actually use the velocity slider to introduce this wobble in real time so I turn the velocity slider down so here we've just got the pitch LFO I'll turn it off so you can hear a bit clearer so if we turn off the pitch LFO we've got that sort of static sound as I turn up the velocity slider start to introduce that de-tune and wobble which can be a really neat performance element so we've looked at trying to be a bit more moderate and now we've looked at how we can introduce some additional richness so let's move on with tip number three so this final tip is about feedback now I don't think there is a single patch in the FM's analog patch pack where I wasn't using feedback within my programming basically what feedback does is it takes the output of one carrier sorry one operator in an algorithm and it feeds some of the signal back to an earlier point in the algorithm now on most of the most of the algorithms that feedback basically is one the output of one operator feeding back into itself and that creates certain types of sounds and I certainly made use of that in programming these patches but there are two really special algorithms that's algorithm four and algorithm six and the reason that these are special algorithms is that the feedback loop is more complex so in the case of algorithm six you've got operator six modulating operator five and then you've got feedback coming back from that point back up into operator six and in algorithm four you've got a tower of six modulating five modulating four which is the carrier and then the output of four can be fed back right up to the top of that tower now feedback can introduce well almost unbearable noise essentially in a lot of cases but this kind of goes back to the moderation tip if you are using the other operators in that feedback loop with a certain level of moderation and you start to introduce feedback you can get some absolutely fantastic sounds so this patch that I've got here is algorithm four so this is the most complex operator feedback arrangement that we've had just for simplicity sake I've turned off operators one two and three and we're just looking at operators four five and six four is our carrier five and six and modulating it and then we've got a situation where the output four can be fed back into operator six now at the moment it is not so let's take a listen to our patch okay so it's kind of a funky bass sound it's pretty chill at the moment now if we were thinking about an analog synth we might think well it'd be great to open up that filter if it was an analog synth and get more sort of rasp and drive from the sound now sometimes you might think well let's just turn up the operator output level but unfortunately if we do that things just start sounding there's some points here where it's kind of workable but in in the main it just starts sounding really f me she don't really want now if we contrast that by introducing feedback the character that we get is a little bit different so not a lot to begin with just trying to get a bit more buzz can you hear that a bit further it's kind of sound almost like resonance on a filter right and get pretty buzzy it might be that we've now got this this operator turned up too high so we can just pull it back a bit so things are getting pretty filthy and actually right at the top we end up getting basically distortion now can you hear that kind of harsh buzziness that sort of upper sort of rasp that's pretty f me and I don't really want that so again we can come back to our operator level so we can just sort of moderate them a little bit we can kind of get sort of almost like a combination of drive and filter resonance if we slow down some of these envelopes maybe getting to drop it further things that sound pretty cool you had a bit of key velocity sense that say we can jam out a bit on our velocity slider we've kind of got ourselves this sort of combination drive resonance filter control now again we might not want to get quite so much fizziness and certainly just dialing that feedback back a little bit we get a real nice little sort of resonant peak to the sound now in this much more complex relationship that we've got here in our feedback loop we can get even more complexity out of the sound if we just detune one of our operators as well kind of get almost like a chorusy organ tones probably a bit too much if we compare that there to that there we've kind of got free chorus and buzz and it's it's just a really cool sound so yeah feedback feedback on everything if you're trying to get these sort of more analog sounds even used more conservatively just adds a little bit of rasp that just makes your patches cool so those are my three top tips for getting analog character into your fm patches i hope that was interesting and useful if it was make sure you hit the thumbs up on this video and make sure that you're subscribed to the channel so you don't miss out on any upcoming videos on synthesis i also hope you've been enjoying the jamuari jams that i've been posting this month obviously because this month is jamuari it's been really fun to get back to to doing lots of jams which is what i started the the channel for in the first place anyway and we have some really lovely responses to those so thank you guys for checking those out in the next month i hope to put out a couple more tutorials a couple more patches from scratch on the vulcraf m we also need to finish off talking about some of the key concepts like feedback in the understanding sound design series i'd also maybe like to put out another patch pack for the vulcraf m i'm trying to do themed patch packs so if you've got a theme that you'd like me to take a look at then let me know in the comments below and obviously it's just been nam so i am plotting purchases for this year um there's one thing that was announced at nam that i am very very excited about and i i think is probably an instant buy for me when they become available um there's another thing that i'm thinking about that wasn't announced at nam actually was announced a little bit earlier uh but it's been sort of playing on mine so um maybe you'll see a couple of new scents on the channel soon that you can check out and i'll be sure to be doing lots of videos with them when i get them anyway guys thank you so much for watching take care and i will see you again soon bye bye