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copied!<p>Redeye:</p> <blockquote> <p>To answer your main question, yes it's absolutely fine to modulate waveforms other than sine waves. In fact, that's what FM is best at. Modulating sine waves gives a very boring sounding output, but when you input more complex waveforms with the same modulation, you get much more interesting results.</p> </blockquote> <p>This is at best an oversimplification and possibly totally false. Modulating sine waves with sine waves is perfectly capable of creating a wide range of complex and not "boring" sounds.</p> <p>In contrast, complex waveforms multiply the number of resulting sidebands massively and make predictable results much more hard to achieve. Most documentation about FM - which is actually the almost-equivalent PHASE modulation (PM) in many common cases including "the" "FM" by Yamaha - concerns sine waves only.</p> <blockquote> <p>FYI (in case you don't already know), the most famous FM synth is probably the Yamaha DX7 which was revolutionary in its day (and also one of the first ever synths with MIDI).</p> <p>The other thing to mention is that FM synthesis was the start of the digital age so the waveforms were generated digitally and hence used more sophisticated waveforms than sine/square/triangle waves to create the interesting sounds."</p> </blockquote> <p>This is totally false without a doubt. The DX7 and many early FM - in reality, PM - synths by Yamaha offered ONLY sine waves, and yet, as I indicated above, they are still capable of many, many non-"boring" sounds. No "more sophisticated waveforms" were involved.</p> <p>Only later did Yamaha add other waveforms, and their utility is somewhat questionable when compared to the predictability of the sidebands created by sine waves, as I stated above.</p> <blockquote> <p>This might be what you need to do to get a better sound - rather than just generate a sine wave to modulate, use complex waveforms."</p> </blockquote> <p>Or just use sine waves with good arrangements and combinations of parameters (ratio, index, etc.)</p> <p>The fact that FM/PM with sine waves does not immediately produce studio-quality - or maybe just analogue-like - results for many users does not indicate whatsoever that it is incapable of doing so.</p>

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