[adriand]

Fair enough. I should try it, although I have a pretty good grasp of how subtractive synths work. What about FM synthesis, do you have any suggestions on that? I find it the least intuitive by far, not that my experience extends to many other kinds (I mainly use wavetable, sample-based and subtractive synths these days).

[weatherlight]

I'd still do the first tutorial above, so you can understand how to use VCV Rack, but here is a small tutorial (10 minutes.) That will help you understand what's going on under the hood of your favorite FM synths. He doesn't do this in the video, but I would attach the output to the oscilloscope module to get an intuition for why certain parameters affect the specific harmonics that give FM its characteristic sound.

Your FM synth at home is 100x more time complicated than this patch you build but if you grok what's going on here, you should have a better idea of what going on in your other FM synths.

https://youtu.be/gzWFunWNTjQ?si=veuGdCTc1gETntO3

[adriand]

Thank you, that looks super helpful!