Music Technology
FM Synthesis: Getting Started With Operators, Ratios and Why Your Patch Sounds Like a Bell
FM synthesis has a reputation for being unintuitive, which is mostly a labelling problem — the two controls that matter are the frequency ratio between operators and the amount of modulation. Learn what those actually do to the spectrum, why integer ratios sound musical and non-integer ones sound metallic, and how to get a bass, a bell and an electric piano from the same patch.