Make a Simple FM8 Techno Synth in Less Than 2 Minutes!

When it comes to frequency modulation sound design, this synth make your work easy. This quick lesson will share how to make an FM8 techno synth in less than two minutes.

Techno is a very broad term in the modern music production world these days, and it’s becoming harder and harder to label sounds as being meant for one specific genre. In fact, most sounds are now used in more than one style of music. And, in a way, this has brought back many simple synth sounds into the spotlight, as they are usually quite easy to manipulate and modulate for a wide range of music types and styles. This particular sound is a simple FM8 techno synth that can be used in classic techno genres, as well as trance, house and many more types of dance music. The best thing about these kinds of sounds is that can be made incredibly fast, which makes it easy to justify the time later on to shape and mold them through in the processing phase of your workflows. Let’s see how this one is made.

As you can see in the image of the FM Matrix below, this is a very easy set up. This FM8 techno synth is made of three sawtooth waveforms, with some subtle feedback applied to each, routed through the filter unit (Operator Z). And there is just a touch of white noise coming from Operator X.

On the Master window, the total number of unison voices has been increased to seven. These voices are then spread out via the Detune and Pan features, which gives our FM8 techno synth much more width and depth. The Analog and Digital Quality elements add some additional character.

Next up are the envelopes. And as you can see, they are all identical.

Our FM8 techno synth is shaped further by a Shelving EQ and a Peak EQ. And some Reverb and Chorus/Delay provide more room and interest.

Lastly, the arpeggiator is used to set this FM8 techno synth in motion so you can hear what it sounds in action.

Here is the audio sample. There is no processing of any kind applied outside of FM8.