Hello there. I am new to FM synthesis and I didn’t find any similar tutorials for DN or any other FM synth.
How to design electricity crackling sounds or something close to it like this:
Here a few tracks full of interesting sounds:
Atom™ - Strom
Pan Sonic - 4’41″
Alva Noto - Uni Normal
Byetone - Plastic Star
Orphx - Tensile
for example
Thanks.
Alva Noto uses a lot of sample reduction with the sounds just starting to break up.
I love alot of this music too but I don’t know if I have any good answers. Pan Sonic used alot of custom made stuff. Mika was known to use ground hum and other relatively unprocessed signals and I think that’s what’s going in 4’41. Before I could afford synths, it inspired me to plug the outputs of half broken circuits into a mixer and hope for the best. Disclaimer- I don’t necessarily recommend doing this, although I never actually blew anything up.
I remember the Reason Subtractor Synthesizer being amazing for popping, clicky, and bubbly sounds. I think I used a saw and sine modulating each other with FM for these. Each OSC tone needs to be distanced pretty far apart if I remember correctly. Holding down the note resulted in some really beautiful popping sounds.
I tried to emulate this on the DN but didn’t have luck. Maybe another project for a rainy day!
these examples are wonderful - they’re out of reason?
Yeah, I made those with Reason’s Subtractor pretty much exclusively (the popping/clicky sounds). I’ll post my patches if I find them on my backup. I unfortunately don’t have Reason anymore (that was 12 years ago!). 
puop cords.zyp (554 Bytes) pop1.zyp (548 Bytes) pop2.zyp (548 Bytes)
Anyone with Reason willing to load these into Subtractor and take a screenshot?
@ericd @virtualpt
I know more or less how Alva Noto and Pan Sonic make or made their music, but I want to figure it out how to recreate similar sounds on Digitone
Those are the patches I used. 
Sorry, maybe a bit of a stretch - subtractive synthesis to full FM (DN), but maybe some reverse engineering could help approaching the sound… 
@JunkRunner hmmmm, I don’t hear what I am looking for in your attached audio and I already have a tutorial for subtractive synthesis in the first post, but anyway thanks
Ah, the “these examples are wonderful” response wasn’t from you. My bad.
I don’t know of any tutorials for the DN that is aimed specifically at creating the sort of music you give examples of. In some ways, those types of sound are quite simple but (as is always the way) there are subtle aspects that are really important in not having it sound lifeless. I also think that the sequencing is key to getting it to work.
If you are new to programming FM synthesis then I think the most important thing to get your head around is how the operators interact. Once you have that, then the various algorithims start to feel like schema to get to various types of tonality/complexity. There are a few tutorials using FM8 here that really helped me to more fully understand the principles of FM irrespective of which particular synth - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRazfCjnF8M
I’m quite new to FM synthesis but I like to experiment. I created this sound that is cranky and noisy.
Don’t know if it is what you need but I think it could be a good starting point.
electro_noise.syx (338 Bytes)
Hope that help.
great example for Alva Noto territory Thanks for posting
