Chances of recreating an FS1r?

The magnificent ensemble Babble On by James Clarke might be useful regarding the formant sequence stuff and for the consonants.

 

@lxint
Hm, not quite human. I think the FS1R could get closer. At least at some pitches.
I also very much liked the twisted piano sounds from the video.

I think I give up on recreating an FS1R. I don't understand the manuals and some of you guys here seem to be more experts than me.
I tried FMonics but somehow I am not so impressed by it. Maybe I need to spend more time with it.

 

If I had infinite time I would make a FS1r inspired ensemble as the FS1r is really really cool. But as I havn't I have to wait until I get laid off or something...

 

ideally you would have a circle on the gui with the vowels in a pentagramm

there are 5 vowels ah eh eeh oh ooh

so you could morph / move from each to each

then you either apply your movements live or record them similar to the recorder in green matrix

not sure about the math thats needed
simplified youd restrict yourself to 4 vowels

a good starting point is another .ens also called vowels its in
the legacy library in

essentials/various/vowels ens

its basically a morphable small filter bank
feeding an FM sound with many harmonics or fm noise instead of the built in waves instrument and mix / crossfade could maybe be similar to the fsr
at any rate its little work to try this just use another fm synth from the legacy folder
like

synth-fm/fatOverdriveFB

just use the first snap on the latter - sounds fantastic, checkt it out
1 minute of building in reaktor and instant fun
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so thats basically what has been said already, just that this is a different ens, both are called vowels

 

You really might want to consider forgetting about reaktor if your passion is broken piano timbres...Consider how simple the micron FM engine is..its barely even 2 op..
The problem with reaktor is for something like FM it lends itself to a misunderstanding of a totally non intuitive way of programming synths..more operators doesn't mean more interesting sounds...8op isn't better than 2op in reality if you can't add more nuance to that less than 2 op patch, it just means more mind boggling parameters to have to control to get what you want..great if you are a master of 2 op synths, but who is? For synthesis of organic instruments, the stuff I've heard from the micron blows reaktor away..there are some AMAZING wind/horns for it...only because of the embedded knowledge of the programmer, the synth architecture is already good enough..
As far as FS1R...this lunatic seems to have made an formant sequence editor back in the day
http://www.xs4all.nl/~niff/fs1r/
From the screen shots IMO it looks like its just an analysis program to tune the voiced/unvoiced bandpass filters over time...
I've still never heard anything from FS1R that holds **** to csound for formant stuff controlling the FOF opcode..
http://www.freaknet.org/~martin/audio/csound/tobias.mp3
Not though because there is something amazing in csounds FOF opcode, its totally in the sco...
"babble" is actually more advanced than this bandpass nonsense as its a rough draft of a vocal track...but the problem is in controlling the control data that csound excels at vs the architecture of reaktor or FS1R..
Praat spanks the **** out of all this for vocal synthesis as its a complex vocal track physical model, but the control data is basically impossible to handle.
http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
Thats why I think miGraine / Marlene v2.0 is the best example of formant synthesis..its not trying to do fake human vocals, the control data is not possible to handle..just makes lovely "singing" string sounds.

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very good information guys...
I did seem to find this problem with reaktor myself, now I know what its linked at...

Maybe just get microns lol, honestly ppl the sound on that youtube vid is seriously out there. I am so surprised as to how its done that.
Im looking into the alesis micron now, seriously these things are cheap, it would be silly not to get one.

Does anyone know though of something similar to create the sounds based in that video?

 

Thanks for your nice opinion about Marlenen I havent used it in a long time
I think it wasnt that intuitive to use either

I totally agree with you about FM and I hate the yamaha FM stuff, both from an editing point and sound wise too in most cases
my FM synth will be different though, it wont be much more complicated than a mini moog and provides some more meaningful parameters

it can already sounds much warmer than FM usually does, actually it can sound warmer than a plain "analog" patch in some way

the algorithm(s) is very simple, its the internal mapping and calculation of parameters that makes the difference also some additional dsp tricks that go beyond yamaha

it will be sort of an "analog" counterpart ( or evolution ) to the yamaha concept

 

The formant operators are probably a mixture of oscillator sync and operator feedback to emulate an impuse wave send thru bandpass filter with an filter frequency envelope and variable bandwidth per Operator.
Formant Operators are complex operator waveforms that can be used as modulator/carrier with modulatable operator waveform. The formant movement is nothing that can be emulated with pure phase modulation an FM synth would need some additions to recreate that...

 

you create a (static) formant with fm when you set the modulator to an integer multiple of the carrier
of course the formant frequency has to change slightly from note to note in this case

you can have a ( moving ) formant at non-integer frequencies by crossfading two fixed formants, and change bandwith via AM - no window = "zero" narrow bandwith, more pulse like window broader bandwidth
this is how paf works
attached is a paf oscillator without variable bandwidth

 

I've read the manual in more detail and looked at the screenshots from the external editor but there is no other clues than that 5 bandpass filters are used. But I also assume some clever feedback etc is used... Unless there are some other source of information we're in the dark on how Yamaha made it, which is sad. Seams like very innovative method.

 

You probably mean the carrier to a multiple frequency of the modulator... Otherwise you rather get bell type sounds...

Doesn't sound like crossfading on the FS1R, is about as smooth as the AN1x pseudo master oscillator sync. I'd guess they used a variety of that technique...

I haven't done much with Reaktor, since I tend not to work with presets or preset synths and haven't found the time to get into synth creation with reaktor yet. Anyway I'll see if I'm able to getting along with your file...

 

you're right of course

its doesnt sound like cross fading either here the reason for this is phase cancellation
also technically its not too far from synched oscillators the fixed frequencies are synched
you just dont have the harsh sound from synching since the periods always match

turns out I attached the wrong file, anyway this one works to you just have turn FB and FM all the way to 0 so you actually here the formants
then move any of the sliders

theres a slight zipping noise but otherwise its quite smooth

 

Well, I would notice even without phase chancelation, I'm used to the sound due to my experience with the K5000 additive formant filter, if the bandwith is to small, you'll notice the fading of the harmonics, so you'll probably have to feed between at least 3 or more sources to make this work properly otherwise even an untrained ear should notice the difference when using the formant operator as modulator...

Not sure when I'll find the time too check, due to my current workload. I simply popped into this discussion to correct a few things, being a long time FS1R-User...

 

heres a wav file with the narrow band paf in case your curious
well actually I am curious about your expertise / opinion

 

I think the fundamental shouldn't be part of the sound...

 

This thread encouraged me to experiment a bit with formant synthesis.

I have already been exploring FM, although have yet to create a truly flexible routing system for it.

Anyway, I took the Formant Osc core cell and added an FM input, then combined that with another Formant Osc, and two sync based Sin/Tri/Saw Oscs running into a multimode filter.

The results are interesting, but I don't really understand the attraction of it? The Formant Oscs themselves don't make good modulators because they push off the pitch.

Actually the formant osc is based on a kind of sync effect I think?

anyway, what exactly makes the FS1R so great? I'd love to explore this idea further...

 

Not on the FS1R, if you having a pitch problem you probably using FM instead of Phase Modulation. When using FM the modulator tends to shift the carriers pitch, in case the modulators area above and below the X-Axis isn't equal.

Having up to 8 Formant Operators, 8 coloured noise generators, flexible scalable Operator Waveforms, every operator comes with its own pitch envelope, an AN1x type VA Filter (with filter saturation instead of filterfeedback), realtime control over most of the parameters and still very good sounding Workstation type FX...

 

Yes, please and then build an ens.

 

Yea basically the kitchen sink for anything you could want in a hardware fm synth, minus any reasonable means to control it so it does have this aura of "i know this box in front of me can make noises no one has ever heard before, especially because its so hard to program".

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Sounds great..I always thought the stuff NI tried to do with the easy edit in FM7 was a great step that they should have taken farther..
Here is a dx7 knob box that Brian Eno had with all the parameters knobbed out.
http://synth.me/music-gear/brian-enos-amazing-dx7-hardware-programmer

I always thought yamaha went in a strange direction when you consider how much time there was between DX7 and SY/TG/FS1R...I mean I can't imagine what FS1R would look like with a knob box like that.

 

If one is used to conventional FM-Synths it might be a bit hard to understand that an operator in Formant Mode is working like a synth within a synth and thus FM wise requires a different strategy. For that reason I can understand your frustration when it comes to the FS1R, it's not working well for everyone, but it's one of my favourite synths and I tend to get along well with it.
The control over the sound (using Formant and FM-Matrix, CCs, NRPNs) is almost VA like, while I wouldn't recommend soundprogramming without editor software.
I guess in case of the FS1R a one knob per parameter box like the Jellinghaus DX-Programmer would fill a wall...