Where do I get one of these?
This link is a great practical guide, which has you look at waveforms in an audio editor and clone them using FM, one operator at a time. He walks you through making clones of several real life instruments, 6 operators is enough to sound quite good and 8 is even better. FM has a reputation for being computer-y sounding but it doesn't need to be. A lot of that is just baggage from default patches introduced decades ago with that fresh '80s sound, those patches from the DX-7 are still on the newest Yamaha flagship workstations. And as everybody knows the grand majority of sounds you hear in music are barely- or not-tweaked presets.
https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/FM_Synthesis_of_Real_I...
Anyway, I found these hands-on demos on the DX1 to be some of the most "aha" moments I've had trying to understand how FM patches are made.
TLDR, an FM "operator" is an oscillator. A carrier is the oscillator you hear, its modulator is an oscillator that wiggles the carrier and brings out different harmonics. You can stack more modulators and you can have multiple carriers going in parallel, the various combinations of operators available in a synth being the different algorithms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV9vQGqoO5c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0xGyR_lKoM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-boGIxRZ_s
There was also one from Venus Theory about how to get musically useful stuff out of frequency/phase modulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqc8rZnzTVI
Everything comes at a cost. The entshitification of everything, the total lack of intention.
I’ve developed boutique hardware instruments and sold them to retailers around the world, so this affects me directly.
It removes financial incentives to do research and development in these areas because overnight someone can just duplicate or imitate your work.
And its the height of hypocrisy from artists to call out for copyright protections of music, but then simultaneously support vibe coded software thats been trained on data thats probably stolen.
I get the world is changing fast, but what its taught me is that people are ravenous and are willing to watch entire industries and maybe even society itself collapse if they think they can get a free short-term meal from it. Pretty disheartening
Think this bodes well for the future of Chinese consumer electronics. They have really been punching above their weight. Even the "cheap" guitar pedals are better than what you'd find with American/EU equivalent companies while being 60-80% cheaper.
Just a shame that Chinese workers are too often exploited.
But as long it is cheap and you'll never visit China, then who cares that someone might be exploited there.
You do understand that costs of making something in the West is different than in China? Some companies unfortunately have to compromise on quality to maintain price that is not outrageous when you compare to Chinese.
...the price of made in china device that is just branded with EU/US brand ?
PS: and I mean PLENTY !
I wonder how long this will last.
This also got companies like Behringer an idea that they can just release the hardware and people will create firmware for free. Genius.
edit: that reminds me I actually bought one too, but forgot about it. Still unopened.
Well, of course. They're able to get the stuff they want to run off of the computer, and onto the device. Not everyone hates working in the box, but a lot of people do.
> This also got companies like Behringer an idea that they can just release the hardware and people will create firmware for free. Genius.
Honestly, this is great. Getting viable hardware with annoying shit like buttons and knobs is beyond the reach of a lot of developers, but writing software is not.
Something like this but for VSTs would be killer.
A couple of these exist in guitar pedal form for lv2 (which is a dead format): Mod Audio Dwarf, and pistomp.
Nothing for VST3 that I'm aware of. Maybe the new Akai stuff?
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/muse-research-receptor
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/muse-research-receptor-...
You can pick them up, often fully loaded with plugins, for a few hundred dollars. I wrote parts of the system. They were running Linux and fun to hack on.
I currently work in the professional audio industry and know of a few modern efforts underway to produce modern version of this, but I am not convinced there is market for such a device anymore.
I'm sure a lot of professional musicians would probably prefer to use something less fragile than a laptop, something you can rack up, with no pesky desktop OS niggles to worry about during a show. As you know many instruments today are simply dedicated VST runners with a handy physical interface, see Roland's Boutique and Aira synths. I have an MPC One which I love, it can run proprietary VSTs. Maybe such convergences have killed the need for a dedicated box.
I know for a fact new devices like this are on the horizon, but it just might not be the form factor that you are looking for.
It's actually a golden age for the MIDI fan but there's a lot of complaining to be done too about aspects of it. Cheapness and hooking you to a store being two big ones.