Bazille fan club – Page 3 – u-he Forum

Load the init patch, make sure PD is set to 0 on OSC1 and 2. You should have OSC1 connected directly to output and it should be a pure sine wave.

Connect the output of OSC2 to Phase modulation (PhaseModDepth, make sure it’s set to PM coarse). Turn that knob up slowly as you play. You’re changing the wave shape and adding more harmonics. Typically OSC1 is called the Carrier, and OSC2 is called the Modulator. The term Operator, confusingly, refers to either.

Carrier is the signal you hear, Modulator is the signal not connected to the output (although you can in Bazille) that modulates the frequency of the Carrier. It’s essentially a fast LFO, hence the term “audio rate modulation”.

Let’s make it more interesting. Route ENV2 to OSC2’s volume mod. Set OSC2’s volume to 0, set its volume mod depth to max. Play around with ENV2, try full sustain and very long attack. You’ll hear OSC2 modulating OSC1’s phase, changing the waveshape and creating more and more harmonics. Make sure to fine tune the PhaseModDepth of OSC1, you don’t need a lot there. Try short to long decays and play around with release.

A common trick with FM programming is to utilize envelopes to control the amount of FM akin to using filter envelopes in subtractive synthesis. That is, in the subtractive world, we modulate the cutoff with an envelope to change the amount of harmonics. In the FM world, we modulate the volume of the modulator (OSC2 in our case) with the envelope to achieve a similar effect.

Play around with the tuning of OSC1 and OSC2, try combinations of fifths, fourths, and octaves, as well as slight detuning of either by a few cents.

Finally, unplug OSC1 from the output. Plug in OSC3 to the output now. Route OSC3’s volume to its own PhaseModDepth, and set it to PM medium. Slowly turn up the depth. You’ll note it transforms into a sawtooth wave at some point. Pretty cool, huh? It’s called feedback. This is how you would’ve gotten a sawtooth on a DX7. In Bazille, of course, there are other options (such as PD knob set to Saw + Same).

With regards to FM being confusing, in my opinion it’s due to confusing UI/UX and questionable design of FM synth programming that goes back to DX7. The idea itself is much, much simpler than the implementation suggests. Dexed, for example, is a nightmare to use and it’s a design disaster, at least imo (well, it’s also free, so there’s that).