I've seen some interest in learning more about FM synth and instrument design around here, so I made this video where I try to explain FM synthesis and mess around with a bunch of instruments to demonstrate how things work: https://youtu.be/cDJ1z-4YsYM

My goal for this video is to help people start to understand how FM synthesis works and maybe even inspire some of you to start getting more hands on with designing instruments! Also, feel free to drop questions in the thread here and I'll do my best to field them.

Disclaimer: I recorded the video in one take, so hopefully the presentation is not too rough around the edges.

wow!!!! i will be watching this when i have a free afternoon!

this is mega cool, thanks for making this! i too will kick back and watch it soon. i do A Lot of tweaking of existing patches but creating something from the ground up still feels like clawing around in the dark to me, a big weak point.

is there somewhere in the lyceum we could link this i wonder?

This is really cool, the exact kinda thing I was looking for when I started messing around with FM. I love that you did several practical examples of modeling the sound. Thanks for sharing.

Wooo! Love FM, but right now making patches feels like herding cats

Re lyceum: we could probably start with the sgen format article since that's the target chip I demoed in the video., maybe include the pages for some of the other FM involved formats like ym2151 as well.

"I Am New To: FM Synthesis" article

A “new to” article makes sense and could be linked on various format pages

Not a bad idea Blast_Brothers, now I'm thinking about starting up that article. I can link to the video there and also provide a text summary of part 1 of the vid.

Bump to:
a) remind that this video exists
b) announce that I finally wrote that "new to" article: https://battleofthebits.com/lyceum/View/I+Am+New+To+FM+Synthesis

oh this will come in handy

(as i think i mentioned before) a next video showing the differences in registers and resulting sound among 2, 4 and 6 operators instruments/patches, where is the sound quality lost when downgrading operators, and how to convert among them - i'm asking because i'm specially struggling in this part (and i think i'm not alone)

Just read over the lyceum article, and after so many years, I think I FINALLY understand how FM synths work!

after 9 years in development, hopefully it will be worth the wait

even as someone who already has decent fm knowledge, this article has some really good tips