Ableton is an epitome of software design innovation. I think few people understand how groundbreaking the Session View vs Arrangement View design was to advance the workflow of both produced and live music. Subcomponents like Operator created design patterns that are widely adopted by most VSTs today. Kudos to the Ableton team for crafting a product that is so beloved.
Oh I love FM synths! I'm working on a customisable one in my spare time lately for the kids' school, as the music teacher was complaining that the students have been using all the same samples over and over. Feel free to have a peek! Desktop only. Source code is hopefully nice and clean too: https://chrishulbert.github.io/you-synth
Ah Operator. This synth is so deep. Not only is it a fantastic FM synth, but it does subtractive synthesis well too. Also, it really is impressive how the UI manages to fit all those parameters. I mostly use it for cool synth leads. Here's one of my favorite videos on Operator https://youtu.be/rfeY0_k1ctk?si=s68Lr033cHf34a4M by Robert Henke himself.
Fyi Robert Henke's new album came out a few weeks ago: https://roberthenke.bandcamp.com/album/studio
Reason has a very nice and versatile FM synth, "Algoritm": https://www.reasonstudios.com/shop/rack-extension/algoritm-f...
Ableton tutorial features an excellent (and completely free) FM synth in-browser: https://learningsynths.ableton.com/en/playground
FM is one of the most "naturally digital" synthesis method to implement, it's trivial once you have an accumulator and sin table working. The simplest form (and arguably the easiest to sound musical), can be expressed with a one-liner formula:
If you're interested in the qualitative distinction between subtractive and additive synthesis this is a fun practical example of why you might use the latter that I like a lot (implemented in operator no less :) )
I always tell new Ableton users to make one practice track using only Operator for every sound. It’s very educational and surprisingly for the new users, effective.
somebody please make a plugin version of operator for both windows and mac, there are zero good options for fm synth plugins in 2024 except for sytrus on windows if they even still sell it. exacoustics GHOST is looking very promising though, just still in its teething stages
I love FM synthesis and I love Robert Henke. Great article
Guy here, who programmed the C++ implementation of Operator: It was a pleasure to build the instrument together with Robert, and I learned a ton from him.
In the 2009 upgrade I replaced the aliasing wavetables with bandlimited ones, generated using IFFT, one per octave. With 2x oversampling, it became aliasing-free as long as you didn’t use FM. When adding the IFFT, the feature of drawing harmonics also became obvious.
Fun fact: The four oscillators were calculated in parallel using SSE intrinsics. It’s the only time I’ve ever been able to improve the performance of something using that particular technology.
For me personally, Operator is a pinnacle of my engineering career - It is one of the most-used synthesizers in the world, though of course, there are much better ones out there.