[HN Gopher] Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live
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Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live
Author : gregsadetsky
Score : 164 points
Date : 2024-09-22 00:42 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (roberthenke.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (roberthenke.com)
| bowsamic wrote:
| I love FM synthesis and I love Robert Henke. Great article
| polotics wrote:
| Had the good luck of attending an Henke (Monolake) concert in
| large-ish and cubical space fully rigged with speaker arrays
| doing wave-field-synthesis which was beyond anything I heard
| before or since. Loud is one thing, gigantic is something else.
| https://roberthenke.com/concerts/wfs.html
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You should have stepped over to the TU Berlin. A few month's
| before that concert, there was a performance/recreation of a
| concert that took place in Koln cathedral of various Messiaen
| organ works, played back on the WFS system installed at the
| TU. Much, much bigger than Henke's setup at Tresor, and it
| was a truly remarkable experience.
| Nabi wrote:
| About a decade ago had the luck attending in-person his field
| recording and granular synthesis workshop in Amsterdam. Such
| an inspiring and humble individual! Still coming back from
| time to time to his timeless album Monolake - Hongkong.
| chubs wrote:
| Oh I love FM synths! I'm working on a customisable one in my
| spare time lately for the kids' school, as the music teacher was
| complaining that the students have been using all the same
| samples over and over. Feel free to have a peek! Desktop only.
| Source code is hopefully nice and clean too:
| https://chrishulbert.github.io/you-synth
| 127 wrote:
| Super cool. Well done. Now make it a full Yamaha ReFace DX ;)
|
| Also woaah, the randomize is amazing.
|
| Proposal: make z and x change octave.
| dokka wrote:
| Ah Operator. This synth is so deep. Not only is it a fantastic FM
| synth, but it does subtractive synthesis well too. Also, it
| really is impressive how the UI manages to fit all those
| parameters. I mostly use it for cool synth leads. Here's one of
| my favorite videos on Operator
| https://youtu.be/rfeY0_k1ctk?si=s68Lr033cHf34a4M by Robert Henke
| himself.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Fyi Robert Henke's new album came out a few weeks ago:
| https://roberthenke.bandcamp.com/album/studio
| bambax wrote:
| Reason has a very nice and versatile FM synth, "Algoritm":
| https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack-extension/algoritm-f...
|
| Ableton tutorial features an excellent (and completely free) FM
| synth in-browser:
| https://learningsynths.ableton.com/en/playground
| fuhsnn wrote:
| FM is one of the most "naturally digital" synthesis method to
| implement, it's trivial once you have an accumulator and sin
| table working. The simplest form (and arguably the easiest to
| sound musical), can be expressed with a one-liner formula:
|
| https://www.desmos.com/calculator/fjp9psrcqb
| yungporko wrote:
| somebody please make a plugin version of operator for both
| windows and mac, there are zero good options for fm synth plugins
| in 2024 except for sytrus on windows if they even still sell it.
| exacoustics GHOST is looking very promising though, just still in
| its teething stages
| S0y wrote:
| Is Dexed not good? https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/
| bowsamic wrote:
| Dexed is good but it's primarily a DX7 including all the
| weird preset algorithm choices and that's not really
| necessary if you aren't using DX7 presets. It's a DX7
| emulator, not really jsut an FM synth for its own sake like
| Operator is
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| there are numerous good FM modules inside VCV Rack (and
| Cardinal), which have the benefit (or drawback) that you get
| full control over both upstream modulation and downstream
| processing. And they exist for all platforms that Rack (&
| Cardinal) run on, not just "windows and mac".
| sramsay wrote:
| Hear, hear! I absolutely _love_ FM-OP from Bogaudio. In fact,
| I 'd say I use that more than any other FM softsynth
| mentioned in this thread.
| johnofthesea wrote:
| Probably not pure FM synth, but what about Aalto from Madrona
| Labs?
| MDJMediaLab wrote:
| Aalto is great. It's more of a west-coast style Buchla
| complex oscillator clone than a traditional FM synth with
| multiple operators, but complex oscillators have at least one
| carrier and one modulator by design.
|
| I use very few software synthesizers but Aalto and Operator
| are two of my favorites.
| inquisitorG wrote:
| I have been out of audio for a long time but this sounds crazy.
|
| Have owned FS1R and DX11, made my own FM synths in reaktor but
| I would still rate FM7/FM8 the greatest of all FM synths. There
| has just never been a better interface to program FM. In the
| same way I would probably rate the FS1R as one of the all time
| worst FM synths and I do enjoy a synth that is not easy to
| program for the uniqueness.
|
| Unless it is vaporware now I would just get FM8.
| yungporko wrote:
| fm8 is still around and i have it but unfortunately on higher
| dpi screens its quite frustrating to navigate the ui
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yeah I'm kinda surprised that there are so few good FM synth
| plugins. They must be out there but just hidden. FM8 is all I
| can really think of
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Not a fan of F 'em by Tracktion?
|
| https://www.tracktion.com/products/f-em
| sutra_on wrote:
| In the sense of having a simple UI? Both Dexed and FM8 are
| excellent FM synths, admittedly with a more cluttered UI.
| NikkiA wrote:
| There are hundreds of 4-op FM synths in plugin format, one of
| them will surely resemble your preferences.
| peapicker wrote:
| Try the Korg Opsix vst. I have the hardware, and the vst is the
| same. Great stuff!
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Dexed, FM8, Opsix Native, Tracktion F'em, Rob Papen Blue3,
| Waves Flow Motion, Tone2 Nemesis.
|
| There's also multimodal synths that can do FM like Bazille or
| MSoundFactory.
| 1zael wrote:
| Ableton is an epitome of software design innovation. I think few
| people understand how groundbreaking the Session View vs
| Arrangement View design was to advance the workflow of both
| produced and live music. Subcomponents like Operator created
| design patterns that are widely adopted by most VSTs today. Kudos
| to the Ableton team for crafting a product that is so beloved.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Not just groundbreaking, but zeitgeist shaping.
|
| Session View (aka "clip launching") represents more than just a
| workflow - it represents an idea of what _music is_.
|
| Some people might want to spend their time arguing over whether
| or how much or when that idea is correct. I'd prefer to note
| that in the 25 or so years since its debut, the idea has
| reshaped so much contemporary music whether it is correct or
| not.
|
| The idea that you build up music out of sections that
| potentially repeat, then move on to another section ... it all
| seems so obvious to us techno-centric geeks. It actually isn't
| how most of the world has traditionally conceived of music, but
| the language that has been traditionally used has often had a
| structure that has made it easy to strip out the complexities,
| and the result is ... Ableton Live's Session View.
| BodyCulture wrote:
| And it is stable, this always shocked me when I tried out
| some other software for music production that it actually
| crashed and killed my project!
|
| You will not have that bad experience with Ableton!
| mb7733 wrote:
| Part of what drives that is that Ableton is designed to be
| used in-performance, so even minor instability isn't
| acceptable at all
| sutra_on wrote:
| The interesting thing about that is that no one in my (limited)
| experience uses the session view as it was intended to be used
| for music composition. After trying it for a bit, everyone
| seems to revert back to using the linear Arrangement view.
| Session view is still useful in some performance cases, but it
| makes me wonder if it would make sense to have it as an
| optional view, and not as the default view for all sessions.
| marpstar wrote:
| Very interesting. When my buddies and I started playing in
| Ableton after years in Adobe Audition (circa 2010?), we
| immersed ourselves in Session view for writing and piecing
| everything together, building songs top-down instead of left-
| to-right. It completely changed our entire workflows, and
| that seemed like the point.
|
| I'm only ever in arrangement view when I'm finalizing the
| order of the sections before final mix down.
| enqk wrote:
| Same here, I only move to the arrangement after I spent
| enough time on a piece in session view. It's also the place
| I put jamming results
| BodyCulture wrote:
| How did you get that knowledge? Everyone?
| amazing_stories wrote:
| Same here, everyone I've introduced to Live has been
| completely stumped by session view and preferred linear
| arrangement. I don't understand why it's the default view
| other than hanging on to the idea that this software is first
| a live looping tool and DAW second.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| Session view user here.
|
| It's trivially easy to make arrangement view your default
| view. You simply hit tab to switch the view to arrangement
| and then overwrite your default template in the 'File' menu.
| Now you're set.
| BodyCulture wrote:
| If only it finally was available for Linux!
| daedalus_j wrote:
| I wish... Live is the only reason I have a windows partition
| anymore. I just can't quite get it to work in
| wine/emulation...
|
| When I'm forced to upgrade to windows 11 I simply won't have
| Live anymore, because I won't be doing that, and so I haven't
| purchased the latest version and am starting to experiment
| with the alternatives. Makes me sad though, it'd be so great
| to have on Linux.
| sureglymop wrote:
| I use it in a VM with vfio pci pass through of a gpu. Works
| fine but I'll probably move to bitwig anyway, I don't
| respect the decision of not having Linux support (they even
| run Linux on their push devices).
| httpsterio wrote:
| Bitwig is made by ex-Ableton engineers and honestly, it blows
| Live out of the water in terms of flexibility.
| ppqqrr wrote:
| Yes, 22 years ago. And while they've expanded some plugin
| features, astonishingly little has changed/improved about the
| base Live since then. Even minor quality-of-life features like
| setting a default audio interface is not even on the roadmap
| for 22 years. I think part of that is probably the clientele,
| musicians aren't exactly famous for asking for more from their
| tools. Maybe I'm a grump for not thinking that "session view vs
| arrangement view" (which is really a bare minimum digital
| mimicry of the popular music making interfaces of the 20th
| century: the magnetic tape and a vinyl loop) is enough as the
| dominant paradigm for music making in a world now driven by
| global, recursive, abstract navigation of/ negotiation with
| interconnected, automated logic processes... But I don't wanna
| be sarcastic.
| tech_ken wrote:
| If you're interested in the qualitative distinction between
| subtractive and additive synthesis this is a fun practical
| example of why you might use the latter that I like a lot
| (implemented in operator no less :) )
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYVsS_X17bM
| Carrok wrote:
| I always tell new Ableton users to make one practice track using
| only Operator for every sound. It's very educational and
| surprisingly for the new users, effective.
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