Instruments • Re: What's the best 6-operator FM synth plugin?

I am very aware of Curves in Phase Plant and what they do, they still don't hold a candle to what's in HALion7 as it's just not precise and hard to draw anything with accuracy with a mouse or even a touch screen,

You can open the editor to make it full screen. And you can zoom in. So from the left edge to the right edge of the screen is 1/10th of a second. And you can define grid steps up to 128 in both dimensions. How are you not able to work exactly with that?

also not sure by what you mean about a tiny screen on HALion7. I can make it fill up the entire screen on my 27" monitor sitting few inches in front of my face.

You can drag Halion itself but that just incereases the widht and height of the gui containers. The GUI elements itself stay small.
Can you get the envelope full-screen? If yes, please tell me how to do it.

I also can draw anything I wish as an envelope using brush, pen and eraser tools. Or I can choose from a great selection of pre-designed shapes or save custom shapes for future sessions. Furthermore, I can cycle through all of them in synchronization with my hosts DAW, turning them into customized LFOs

You can do exatly the same in PP. Might you have missed the deep-dive?

So you can have in PP have 30 or 50 oscillators with each imaginable waveform, wavetables, even samples in it

With HALion7 I can have 32 operators in a layer and 64 layers in a patch that means I can have 2,048 operators in a single note if I want

What do you mean, when you say, you can load an operator in a layer? According to Halion terminology you can load an FM-Zone in a layer. And the maximum of operators in such an FM-zone is 8, right? And as far as I understand you can not do FM-Modulation between zones(?).

With HALion7 I can load up to 256 elements each element can be a single FM operator or a complete 8 operator FM synth, it can be a sample, granular, wavetable, spectral, VA, noise or whatever.

Now you are talking about stacking not FM capabilities. And same as above: what should be the value of a single FM operator, as long as you can not modulate beetween other zones? Or can you?

I can apply effects to any of them which by the way blow away those in PhasePlant ...

I regard them both mediocre - nothing like blow away, but in PP it's way easier to build chains and multiband structures

... and then use that audio as a Modulator on an FM operator

How is that possible to do FM modulations like that?

With FM Lab I can select one of many preset waveforms, each on them specifically designed to get the most possible out of FM and then modify them further into whatever waveform I can imagine using the spectral skirt controls by changing them harmonically

Yes and with PP you can take each waveform you want. Including for FM optimized wavetables (e.g. from Massive X)

PP can do for sure 90% of what FM-Lab can do (and I think it's even way more). But FM-Lab can't even do 5% of what PP can do. And I am just speaking in terms of FM capabilities.

It's the 10% it can't do that matters for deep FM for me and I totally disagree with that 5% number

Alone the fact that you can take each waveform and samples against having a limited set in Halion leads to that. Except a missed a way to modulate between zones where I am waitung curiosly since you indicated that it is somehow possible.

Again I own Phase Plant, but it's missing a lot of little and major things that prevent it from doing deep FM ...
... it's just to limited

No it's not. Actually it is beside MSoundFactory the most capable synth in terms of FM. If you want to get more crazy you need Reaktor or Max/DSP or at least something like VCV rack. With Halion you can stack as hell, but you can not freely route 30 or 50 operators to each other.

So you obviously didn't read my comment closely. FM8 is the successor of FM7, and is therefore closely modelled on the DX7, and for that reason, does have the keyboard scaling curves. Same goes for Arturia's DX7 emulation, and for Dexed (obviously).
My point was, that many newer FM-oriented synths forgo the implementation of those curves.

Yes I did. The point is that 80-90% even of the newer FM-oriented synths are relatively closely modeled to the DX7 and just try to extend it. So I don't see that most of them cannot do what a DX7 could do.

The OP6 is a case in point because it doesn't have them, even though it can import DX7 sysex.

Even the one example you brought, seems not correct to me. Look at the manual
https://cdn.korg.com/us/support/downloa ... n%2Fpdf%3B

at page 53. Isn't that exactly the key scaling curve, you also have in the DX7?

Drawing curves is no substitute for how you program with the DX7 curves. Again, if you ever did any deep programming on a DX7 (or emulation thereof), you know this.

How do you program key scales in DX7 differently, than in f'em? And of course free drawing curves is more capable than the 4 curves you have available in the DX7 for key scaling, when I got it correctly from the manual, so DX7 key scaling is just a small subset of what f'em can do.

It boils down to the envelopes. MSEGs usually are fixed and you can‘t modulate the parameters of the segments. Envelope segments need to be able to be modulated on each parameter after the keystroke. 3 Segments would already be enough to apply velocity on the first, aftertouch on the 2nd (sustain) and release velocity on the last… Many ADSR envelopes do that except for the peak, which is fixed and usually you can‘t create a pianissimo start and then swell into fortissimo…
All these extra delay and hold parameters are better covered with curves… Gimme an APDSR and I am happy… Yeah, and there is the 40+ years old DX and it got it!
This has nothing specifically to do with FM, its a lack of expressivity for the majority of synths…

The only synths I have in mind, which can modulate MSEGs as you request are Serum(1/2) (which is not the typical FM-synth) and if I am not wrong f'em can also do it, means modulate the x and y values of each envelope stage separately.

Dr. John Chowning was the guest of honor at KnobCon a few years ago, and gave a presentation about his accidental discovery and then development of FM. There was a big demand for imitating instrument sounds at the time. One of the main approaches they had to sound design with FM was to look at a spectrogram, identify harmonics / formants etc. and imitate that. They'd compare to graphs of Bessel functions showing the spectra produced by FM, and go from there. 6 operators and complex envelopes were helpful for generating formants, transients, etc.

If you're not interested in imitation, even 2-op FM is musically quite useful and 4 is a good sweet spot.

Very interesting topic. Is there some reading about that topic?

Statistics: Posted by SamDi — Fri May 02, 2025 7:16 pm

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