Creative Stereo FM8 Tutorial

This short FM8 tutorial shows you a great way to add stereo depth and interest to your sound. It works great especially for string and pad like sounds and also for all kinds of percussive sounds.

A great way to add stereo depth and interest to your sound is to double your whole operator configuration of a certain sound and then use one fully panned to left channel and other, slightly modified version for the opposite channel.

Let’s look at a simple example:

You can see there are some subtle differences in operator amplitudes as well in ratio and offset values. While such small differences add subtle nuances and interest to the sound you can also go with more extreme settings but at the risk of sound getting separated which is probably not what you want.

This technique works great especially for string and pad like sounds and also for percussive sounds. You can make very unique sounds by modifying the attack transients with changing the amplitude envelope of opposite operators slightly.

Have fun with this FM8 tutorial!