Yamaha FB-01

The Yamaha FB-01 is an eight voice, 8 part multi-tambral, 4 operator FM synth. It has no keys and therefore must be played over midi. It has no built in parameter editing, however it may be programmed using an editor on a computer. The FB-01’s FM uses sine waves (each operator produces one sine) which is assigned to be a modulator or a carrier. The routing of each operator and its role (modulator or carrier) is determined by an algorithm (8 are available). The modulator modulates another modulator’s or carrier’s sine (or both) depending on the selected algorithm. The carrier(s) is the final waves(s) that are routed to the output after being modulated by other modulators. This allows for a tremendous sound palette. The result of this is usually a bell or metallic like sound. However it is possible to produce a variety of sounds but it is more difficult than subtractive programming, but definitely worth the effort. Unfortunately with only 4 operators unlike the DX-7 which uses 6 it is a little limited in the sounds it may produce. While I have created a lot of interesting sounds on this machine, I also created a lot of crap and the good sounds are usually used in conjunction with an analog sounds or in a very quick riff. The machine starts to come to life when used with an effect processor.

The main strength of this machine is that it can play eight different sounds at once (multi-tamabral). While this is not much of an accomplishment today, when the FB-01 was released in 1987 this was not that common and it was unheard of at the FB-01’s list price of $399. Also FM was really popular in the mid 80’s and this was the lowest priced FM synth module ever made by Yamaha. Today you can buy one used for $75 and I recently saw someone selling two for $100, so they are really cheap. This machine is really fast executing computing commands since FM is purely software produced (no voltage controlled activities here), and it responds to patch changes really quickly. Additionally I have never had a single problem with this unit, I don’t think it has ever locked up on me either which something I can not say about any other synth I have ever owned.

The machine does have shortfalls (as do they all). First it does not have dynamic voice allocation so in multi-tambral mode you assign a midi channel to any voice and the maximum notes that the voice will play. When the maximum notes of all the channels equals eight the FB-01 automatically assigns the maximum number of notes to any other voices to zero. Unfortunately this means that while you may use all eight voices at one point in your composition when the machine is only using 1-7 voices you may not have another voice playing unless it is one of the voices whose maximum notes is greater than zero. However there is one advantage to assigning midi channels to voices opposed to voices to midi channels which is that you may assign up to eight voices to the same midi channel. This is important because you may want one sequence to play two sound at once without having to create an identical second sequence to play the second voice on a different midi channel. The unit has no effects processing at all not even a chorus which makes the machine sound quite dull without some effects. The unit also only has one LFO for all voices, however you may adjust the input of the LFO into each voice. Also with most FM synths except the (SY-77, TG77, and SY99) there are no filters, which makes creating good sounds a harder task, but if you are good programmer than it shouldn’t be a stumbling block. The output volume also seems is some what lower than all the other synths I have used. The final oddity is either an advantage or shortfall. First the when modulating one sine with another sine you may set it to 'distort' by adjusting the feedback parameter (this is normal). However let say I have the voice volume on 100 of 127 and I have feedback set to four and I get a slight distorting of the sound, if I turn the voice volume to 127 the amount of feedback increases, but these to parameters should be unrelated. This is usually an advantage in that you can further adjust your sounds but when trying to get a good final mix if you have to turn up the volume you may have to go back to the patch and re-edit the feedback.

The FB-01 is a interesting little synth, nothing that impressive but for $75 there is a lot there and there must be reasons why Yamaha sold so many FM products and why its sound was used to death in the 80’s.

FM was developed by John Chowning at Stanford in the early 70’s and subsequently patented by him. Chowning showed John Pierce at Bell labs the sounds he was making using FM and Pierce immediately instructed him to get it patented and to try to license it. Chowning showed it to most of the American synth companies who passed. Yamaha heard the FM sound and immediately licensed it from Chowning. The DX line was the third line of synthesizers that used FM as a sound synthesis technique and the DX-7 was Yamaha’s first synth to incorporate MIDI. It is nothing short of amazing that with two previous flops (at least in terms of sales volume) that Yamaha continued to pursue this route. When Yamaha release the DX-7 they were confident that they could sell 5000 units and that this would have been a financial success. I guess they underestimated their sales by about 145,000 units.

up one level