Hi,

I'm not familiar with FM synthesis. I tried to patch a occillator (modulator) on another (carrier) on the FM  (audio output >fm input) but I get a out of tuned sound...

is someone know how we can do it on Origin ?

thx
Nico

Doing FM on analog style synths is problematic.  The only thing I can tell you is the best approach is to use pure tones to start with, like sine and triangle waves.  For the modulator, begin with a low volume and play with the pitch.  The most musically useful sounds will be in the octaves, and the rest will sound like bells or buzzes.  Increase the volume and change the pitch some more.  If you like it, you can move on to modulating the levels of the "carrier" and "modulator" with envelopes, if you don't like what it's doing, then I'd suggest you forget it.  I personally don't care for FM done on anything but a true FM synth like the DX7 or SY77.

thank you for your answer,
I saw that this is problematic: s

for the theory, I do not really understand the difference between an analog and a FM frequency modulation. Even if I find out this difference (the amount of modulation changes the pitch of the sound on the analog one but not on the FM one), I don't find the answer on the web...

in practice, I will try on a real FM synthétiseur. are there any FM matrix synthétiseur (like FM8) in actual hardware or should I search an oldie ?

thx

The main difference between analogue FM and digital FM is that with digital you can maintain numerically precise frequency relationships to make the sounds completely controllable. This is exactly what the Yamaha FM synths pulled off to make musical FM sounds viable for consumers. This can't be done in practice with analogue circuitry, as you can never achieve such precise frequency relationships - there's just to much variation and drift. However you can get sounds that you can not get with digital FM.

If you want to make FM patches on the Origin it might be an idea to turn the TAE knob all the way down (the "analogue feel" knob in the program common section).

I don't know FM8, but if you want a very capable hardware FM synth, I think it all culminated in the Yamaha FS1R rack module synth with 8 operators and 88 algorithms.

I haven't played with things like FM8 yet but Origin seems to me an ideal way to explore FM synthesis (although you might not get results identical to dedicated FM synths). You can have up to 9 oscillators per program, so you can have a 9-operator FM patch if you want. And you can assign encoder knobs to all kinds of things like FM amounts and AM amounts.

There is a factory patch, 244 "Bellade" that shows a very simple 3-operator FM patch. Osc2 modulates the FM of Osc1 and they are tuned 8 semitones apart (I think octaves and 5th intervals work well too). Osc 3 is not modulated and is in "parallel" with the Osc2 carrier.

You can try connecting Env2 to the AM input of Osc1, set Env2 to a short decay, and you get a typical percussive FM patch, where Osc3 provides the main tone and the Osc1/Osc2/Env2 combination providing the percussive mallet sound.

What I'm not sure about is,  if you were to set up the same patch in a dedicated FM synth, would you get the same result as here, when the envelope modifies the modulator->carrier modulation amount? In the Origin it seems to become atonal as the envelope decay progresses. In a dedicated FM synth, would it just fade to a pure sine without getting atonal harmonics?

Thx for yours advice...

I found a yamaha TX802 (DX7 like)... Origin is not good for FM sythesis (so simple in the TX802)...
maybe a future feature....

see ya
Nico