Hi David,

Thanks for your kind words and interest. There has been great fear and the urban legend that FM is hard to use... My career in the Musical Instrument industry has been greatly influenced by FM synthesis, so I've had a ringside seat, if you will with this "hard to use" reputation.

It was 1983, a lot of things were NEW. Computers were new, and at that time not everywhere -as they are now. Among the list of firsts that the DX7 brought were: it was an early adopter of MIDI, it introduced the words "digital" and "synthesizer" to the same sentence, it has a (gulp) BIG screen... For the first time you were looking in a screen with information in it!

This was huge. Previous to this, look at any keyboard, there is no screen. There are no menus, there is no navigating a menu list... All of this was new, brand new. If you weren't there it maybe difficult to imagine. Out of ten people I showed it to 8 or 9 were seeing navigation through a menu driven architecture for the very first time. 10 out of 10 were seeing for the first time on a musical instrument.

That (and the math) is what made FM "hard" to use. I was a musician that learned audio engineering... So I lost my fear of the math in the decade just before the DX7(FM)... So the musical mathematics was right on point for me. But not until I meet some of the good folks at and associated with Yamaha did the lights really come on. Knowing the math behind the Frequency Modulation technology is very much akin to knowing musical theory.

While it can help you - the important point is, it can't hurt you!
You can play perfectly fine without any background in musical theory. Some folks play without any musical theory in their background, and play at an extremely high level of competence. It is not necessary to be schooled to be a great player (but it can't hurt either).

Programming FM can be done on an intuitive level... What this means is, if you have good ears and a basic understanding of the building blocks and how they connect and interact, programming is purely your ability to "hear" and adjust/shape the sonic results.

This time around, the menus, interacting with data in a screen, is, literally, child's play. Kids nowadays could walk up to a 1983 DX7 and navigate it better than a grown person could in 1983! ...so common are menu driven systems, now. The mathematics of music can help you understand why you are hearing a certain result from your oscillators, but it is still your ear (your taste) that decides what you create!

Bottom line: we too, are excited to reintroduce FM, and particularly, DX-style FM back into the creative workspace! While from a practical/historic point of view Dave Smith's point of view is on point in this discussion. For far too long, the fear of FM stems from the fear of learning anything new.

In an analog synth, you can be successful... (And trust me, the key feature that made analog synths take off was the preset) for all their creative power, recalling it on stage was the bottom line. Everyone remembers Keith Emerson on stage with multiple MiniMoogs... The average keyboardist couldn't afford to do this but we all knew why... One was setup for each different "patch" he needed. But you can be a successful programmer completely intuitively with an analog synth... once you recall or setup a preset... You move a knob, if it improves the sound you keep doing it, if it "breaks" the sound - you put it back!
🙂

You really don't need to know what PMD stands for... But of, course, if you take the time to learn what it is, the knowledge can't hurt you, you simply can get to the "finished program" more efficiently!

Those who understand the terminology of synthesis... Even if it's only on the analog side of things, you can quickly fill in the background of FM synthesis.
_ If they only know: there is a switch that selects a SAWTOOTH wave on their analog synth
You can teach them how to "construct" the same wave on the FM synth... And the tweak heads will love that you actually "construct" from a sonic viewpoint, the source wave. You have continuous control over the timbre of that source wave. Not just a single Sawtooth, or a Sawtooth Up/Sawtooth Down selection, (like it or lump it) but with FM-X an array of continuously variable timbres that are in the sawtooth family, by contrast.

Then once they understand how to construct a square wave (pulse family)... they are on their way!

Using any basic knowledge of synthesis will help make FM extremely DOABLE for more folks this time around!

Thanks for the post, uncaduncad!

My first synth was the DX100 so it was all I knew about synthesis in '86/'87 or so... Been hooked ever since! Thanks for the reply!!!
Definitely an exciting time for keyboard players! Hardware is alive and well!