Yes, the complexity of the internal engine and not being to control it all easily from on-board controls didn't do it any favours. Thankfully, nowadays there are a few editors you could use in software including one my member Thor, and there's a large physical one too, but it has to use paged controls even then for the roughly 900 parameters.I've owned several FS1Rs and the editor when it came out but I sold them off a long time ago. Everyone knows that true story that the FS1R was so unpopular Yamaha was giving them away for $500 I think at one point. Obviously the editor brought it back form the dead.
Something could be done about the PSU too for better sound, but it has some interesting architectural decisions; the voiced and unvoiced formant ops for one, with some additional params like Skirt, etc... The formant Sequencing can be very versatile too and the inclusion of the circuit-level physical model of the filter like the AN-1x has, courtesy of Dr. K's Lab is a great idea.
It is interesting to think of Montage M's FM-X where the 88 Alg structures are kept but not necessarily the Formants unless there is still a way to do that but it's not advertised. A feature like Motion-sequencing should allow doing the equivalent of FSeqs IMO.
It's not super costly to do simple FM for sure.Apparently there's noting to it. I'd rather have true analog.
They have very different purposes. If by analog you mean Subtractive Analogue, it's quite versatile while being simple to program, pads are great, as can be basses with the Resonance parameter, but we have to deal with that issue of of the filter always being in the signal path. Some tones aren't accessible.
FM does without the filter altogether in its purest form, but there have been nice extensions with filters in the SY-99. The metal, tines, sometimes glassy tones, bells and so on are more natural in this method. The most interesting thing to me is perhaps the very dynamic characteristic of the sounds where a bunch of new harmonics are created very rapidly.
I have a few ideas for the formants and their integration, and I have done some parallel work for enhanced Additive Synthesis too which should apply either partially (hehe) or completely. For me an FM Synth is actually FM + Additive, which should be apparent if you look at some of the Algs of the DX-7. Alg 32 is the end of a spectrum of FM + Additive Algs in the DX-7, because if you use no self-modulation on the last Op, then you have an Additive Algorithm with 6 sines.
Even with Algs that have 3 branches of FM Op Pairs, you need to mix them together which is an additive process but with large groups of harmonics at at time rather than the individual sine partials of a core Additive engine.
Statistics: Posted by Yash — Sat May 03, 2025 9:33 pm