Are you happy with Polybrute FM?

Brute PolyBrute
#1

Hi,

I’m new to the PB12 and trying to understand the FM. It doesn’t sound anything like the FM I was expecting. With a 1:1 ratio between OSC1/2, I turn up the amount and hear firstly something that sounds like ring mod, and then as the amount increases, the carrier seems to go out of tune. Is this what everyone is hearing?

I’ve run endless calibrations, and everything else seems to work fine. No particular tuning issues, at least for an analog synth.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone has any tricks to make FM work more the way I expect, or if anyone knows of any presets which make use of the FM feature in conventional ways.

Thanks,

Simon

#2

I agree. I love the polybrute but i am not happy with the fm.
And i have not found any useful way to use it so far. Would love to hear how other people make fm sounds with the polybrute…

#3

Agreed, no idea how FM works and sounds!

Rob

#4

It sounds exactly what I would expect from FM with VCOs. “Analog FM” strongly affects the pitch and isn’t stable across a very large range.

You can’t expect glassy or very bell-like tones like from digital frequency- / phasemodulation or deep modulation amounts like from thru-zero-fm.

So, it is alright as it is in PolyBrute.

Take little amounts of the FM knob up to 30% to get irregular vibrato and detuning effects. Get up to 50% fm amount and experiment with tuning of both vcos for basses, plucks and leads.

3 Likes
#5

Yeah - the PB is an analogue subtractive Synth.
The FM modulation is set directly after the basic oscillators.
This means it is easy to destroy FM sound shaping with following filtering, LFOs, and the matrix.
Many (most?) software synth are based on additive synthesis and have different options to design a sound - as explained by “exitLaub”.