 This is FM8 from Native Instruments, a synth plug-in which normally costs $150 but you can currently get it for $10. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you will. Now before you rush off by following the link in the description down below and buying this great plug-in, you may want to wet your appetite by sticking around and listening to some of my favourite presets from FM8. Now once you do buy the plug-in, you may want to head back here because towards the end of this video I've got a mini tutorial on FM synthesis using this plug-in just to get you going with creating your own sounds. But let's start off by taking a look at some atmospheric presets. There are many atmospheric and pad type presets which come with FM8 and I have picked just four of them to show you here. The first one is called Aftersign, let's have a listen. Not a basic sound that could be used in all kinds of situations but what about something a little bit more complex below freezing? I love that high stuff going on there. Now I've picked something as well which is called Emerging Intruder. This one's got quite a slow build-up to it, okay so hang in there and I think you'll like the results. I mean if you're using this for a soundtrack and you want to create a kind of a spooky or tense situation, absolutely amazing. And finally I've gone for something a little bit more complex again with this one which is called Likeness Within. Now you'd be forgiven for thinking there's some kind of arpeggiation going on there. There isn't but there are quite a number of presets which do use the arpeggiator feature of FM8. Let's listen to a few of those now. This ambient mallet, the first of the arpeggiated presets that I've picked here from FM8 and let's try another one here, a little sort of breathy one called Breather, sounds like this. Of course you can adapt these yourself to your own needs and by the way they can be linked to the tempo of your door as they currently are at the moment, all of these are being played at 120 as my door is set to that and you can see that tempo sync is switched on here. Let's try this one, this is called Crystal Clear Guitar. That could be the basis of a whole song right there, something a little bit more electronic sounding, Dub Deliberate, there's such nice sounds going on there and finally let's try Smooth Stab. In case all of that is all a bit soft for you, let's go to some edgier presets. Colour of dirt there has got a little bit of an edge to it but let's just dial things up a little bit and go to this one, Crunch Crusher, like that very edgy indeed or like this one, Multiple Life. And finally to get really edgy, how about this one, Tube Thumper. When I say really edgy, there's a nice way you can adapt this one, if we go over to the Easy More feature, which I'm going to go into in a little bit more detail later on, we can use this kind of joystick control here to adapt the sound, so we can start off with a rather softer sound here and get much more edgy. Again, more on Easy More later, we're getting pretty rhythmic there, but how about some percussive sounds? Of course, we can take that sort of percussive sound and we can arpeggiate it as we have there to get rhythms going like that with that Cannabals preset. How about this one, Be Styly. Again, the basis of another song. And finally, what about some pitched percussion with this Marimba preset? Now, before we get into actual synthesis, I thought it would be fun to take a more in-depth look at that more feature we looked at earlier. I've got this After Sun preset loaded up here, it sounds like this. And then I can use that joystick control here to change the sound. So let's do that. And this is a way of morphing some of the presets we have. So for example, we've got our After Sun preset, but I'm going to go over to the browser. Let's go for likeness within. Now, you can see there's a little mini representation of the morph feature at the top right here. So I'm going to take that likeness within preset and I'm going to drag it to the bottom right corner of the morph or the mini morph representation. Now I'll drop it there, go back to the morph interface and you can see likeness within is here. So now we can morph to that preset as well. So as you can see, it's really cool and quick and easy to use feature to start to blend for your presets together. When you start to do that in real time, you get some really nice organic effects. So now that we've got a good overview of the presets, which come with FM-8, how about making your own sounds from scratch? If you've never done it before, that may seem a little scary. Well, I'm going to give you a quick guide now to help you get started. And I think you're going to find it's actually a lot of fun. Sounds in FM-8 are created by using its six oscillators. And we can see them lettered here, A, B, C, D, E, F. Currently, oscillator F is switched on and its level is set to 80. And if we click on it, we can see its controls appear over here. And it currently sounds like this. That's the sound of a sine wave. Now, things get much more interesting when we take one of the other oscillators and feed its output through to this oscillator. So let's turn on oscillator E here by right clicking on it. And then I'm just going to look at the place on the matrix here where they intersect. That's this cell here. I'm just going to click and drag up. Yeah, and that sets the output level going through from E to F. OK, so you can see how that routing is working there. Let's just see how that changes the sound as I move that level up and down. Well. So you can hear there how oscillator E is changing the sound of oscillator F. Now, we can then change the rate of oscillator E here. I'll click on it, yeah, and I'll go over to its ratio over here. And you can see how that changes as I drag that up and down. And if we get it down really, really low, yeah, I'll just keep dragging it down and down and down. You can actually hear the oscillation there. It's slow enough that you can really hear it and it creates that kind of vibrato effect. So let's set the ratio for the moment to just change that to say five and have a listen to that. Now, where things become much more interesting is when we change this level over time, OK, so it's not just at a constant rate. And we can do that by using the envelope control. So you can see those down here. I'm just going to drag one of the handles here and just do this little envelope here where we've got a very quick attack here and then a bit of a decay. And that then sounds like this. So we're getting that oscillation from oscillator E going through to F, but it's changing over time. Yeah, we could do something different here and change the attack. Let's try that. Yeah, you can see and hear the effect that that's having there. Let's just make that quick attack again. We'll just adjust this a little bit. I'm going to change this up here now to 15. Yeah, I'll keep messing around with the overall level over here. Get that down to 15. Have a little play with that. We've got our first kind of electric piano kind of a sound. Now, you can do much, much more complex routing than this, of course, and much more complex envelopes. Not only can you feed oscillators through to each other, but you can also have them feedback on themselves. You do that by going to the cell above the oscillator. So I'll go above F here and I'll drag up and we'll have a listen to see how that sounds. You can hear you can get much more sort of aggressive sounds by doing that kind of thing. There's much, much more to explore here. With these controls, I encourage you to do that. But that's the basis of FM synthesis in FM 8. Honestly, if I can do this, you can do this. It's just a matter sometimes of pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone. Talking about that, I recently did push myself outside of my comfort zone by making a beat. You can watch the video about that over there on the other side of the logo. I had a lot of fun using some other native instruments plugins for that. Check it out now.