Making a Modern FM Bass in FM8 and Sytrus

You may be wondering why this video was selected to be featured on the site. I have two good reasons. First and foremost it provides a great opportunity to those FM8 users who are new to FM synthesis to see how lucky they are to have an incredibly well made and nicely designed synth to work with while learning a new approach to sound design. And secondly, we do not have many opportunities here to feature tutorials for FL Studio users, and this one happens to go into some detail about how to create automation clips and some other helpful insights. All that said, it is also an easy tutorial and it is presented in a way that can be followed along with and understood by those who are new to frequency modulation synthesis.

The sound itself is a kind of modern talking electro style bass, and the key to the modulation is in the envelopes. One thing that is not really explored in this lesson are the many different things you can accomplish with just the envelopes within FM8 with a sound like this one. And it is such a simple design, that it leaves plenty of room for tweaking and customization. Another tip for you if you are having troubles replicating the sound in the lesson, you can switch your view to Expert Ops and see all of the pitch ratio settings and waveforms in one window. And you can use the Expert Env window to see all of the operator envelopes in one place. This should help you match things up easily.

The depth of instruction is not too great in this video, in regards to the FM8 workflow and mechanics, but the sound is a good one to learn, and the comparison with another synth is nice. The way FL Studio interfaces with synths is a little different than other DAWs, so the additional instruction on how to map parameters is also helpful.

Do you have tutorial requests, or perhaps tutorials of your own that you would like to share with the world? If so, let us know by dropping us a message before you take off today. Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers,
OhmLab