 Hello, OscillatorSync here and welcome to a brand new series on the channel and a brand new piece of gear for the channel as well. This is the wonderful Korg Volca FM. Now what the series is going to be all about is patch creation and sound design on this wonderful little box. So we're going to be taking a look over the course of a number of videos at the different parameters that we have to work with when we're doing sound design on the Volca FM and come to understand sonically what effect they're going to have on our sounds with the ultimate goal essentially being that we end up being better at getting from the sound in our heads to the sound in the synth itself. Now the method of synthesis that the Volca FM uses is frequency modulation. That's what the FM stands for in Volca FM you'll be surprised to hear. And there is this legacy of fear and certainty doubt this belief that frequency modulation is somehow different and difficult and complicated. Part of that probably comes from the fact that the iconic FM synths back in the day, the Yamaha DX series of synths, which all sounded wonderful but they had a very difficult unused or friendly interface when it came to programming new sounds. I think that's probably fair to say. Now Korg have done a lot on the Volca FM to streamline that. There's still some menu diving to be sure but the menus are much more rational and easy to navigate. The other reason that I think frequency modulation is considered to be difficult is that it's seen as being fundamentally different from analog subtractive synthesis which is what I think a lot of us who understand synthesizers, that's the kind of synthesis that we understand. And scientifically, mathematically, yes, they are very different methods of synthesis but there are some concepts that are basically the same. And in this first video that's what I want to talk about philosophically, the similarities and the differences and the reference point around frequency modulation synthesis that we have if we come from a background of analog subtractive synthesis. So in subtractive synthesis, usually the way that we work is we start with a complex harmonically rich waveform, something like a sawtooth wave, so it's the monologue. And that's a sawtooth wave, it's buzzy, it's rich and that's because it's full of harmonics. Now what we usually do when we have a buzzy rich harmonically interesting waveform is that we do something to it, we apply something to it to change how many harmonics there are. What we do on subtractive synthesis is we apply a filter. So depending on how we have our filter set we can adjust the harmonic content of the sound. Now if we want to have that sound change over a period of time we might apply, say, an envelope generator to control that frequency cutoff for us, so something like this. Or we might apply an LFO to do a similar sort of job. So we're starting with something rich, we're doing something to it to alter the richness and then we're using envelope generators and LFOs so that we can have that richness change over time to create time rule change. Now when it comes to frequency modulation, basically we're turning the idea on its head, so whereas in the subtractive analog synth world we start with something rich and make it less rich, in FM we start with something that is not rich at all, a sine wave usually. Now sine waves are boring because they have only one frequency in them, so there's no harmonic richness to speak of at all. So in FM what we do is we start with something boring and non-rich and then we do something to it to make it richer and what we do is we apply a modulator to it. So as we apply a modulator to it we make the waveform richer and just like when we're talking about subtractive synthesis we can have that richness be changed over time by applying an envelope for example, or we could do a similar sort of thing with an LFO. So as you can see a lot of the ideas that we're familiar with in subtractive synthesis still stand here, the idea that we are adjusting something in a waveform and varying that adjustment over time, that same idea still stands in frequency modulation, it's still the bedrock of everything that we do, it's just that it's turned on its head, the thing that we apply is increasing the complexity rather than decreasing the complexity. And actually because of the way that FM synthesis works and because of the fact that in the case of the Volcro FM and the DX7 that it's inspired by, we have something called six operators we'll get on to operators in the next video, the possibilities that we have for creating evolving complex sounds that have different kind of tonal and atonal complexities to them are just huge, we can create sounds with FM that we can't dream of creating with analog subtractive synthesis. And that's what I want to demonstrate over the course of these videos, by going through these different parameters that we can use to shape and mold our sounds, the incredible sound design potentials that this tiny little inexpensive box holds for us. So I hope you'll join me on this journey, make sure that you hit the like button and especially make sure that you subscribe so that you don't miss any of the upcoming videos on the wonderful Volcro FM and lots of other stuff on synthesis as well. See you soon guys, thank you so much for watching.