I can appreciate these instruments now, especially in their historical context, legacy in music, and from a technical perspective. But I still carry a 30 year old dislike of "that FM sound", for the dumbest of reasons:
I was in college in the 90s. My roommate had a PC with a Soundblaster card, and he played this Star Wars game incessantly. It has a terrible, insipid, repetitive, infuriatingly annoying soundtrack that I grew to despise with every molecule of my being, mostly because I was subjected to it as an eternal everlasting torment, but also because I had an Amiga and my computer was clearly superior in every way especially when it came to sound.
Anyway, hearing this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TexOZwatuLg - constantly caused me to associate all FM sounds, even in good music, with this cheap "wah wah wah ee ee wah wah wah" noise, which I've only partly shaken decades after the trauma. Also, when he wasn't playing that one, he was playing this Dune game (https://youtu.be/gOscXf0Fpmk?si=hUZ8g0GZ48CKfKzh&t=7394) with a more varied but equally cheap sound, and on top of that playing the game triggers the most repetitive samples ever devised by man. Reporting, acknowledged, reporting, acknowledged... oh, the torture.
Where was I? Ah, that's why I'm not a fan of FM synthesizers.
I was in college in the 90s. My roommate had a PC with a Soundblaster card, and he played this Star Wars game incessantly. It has a terrible, insipid, repetitive, infuriatingly annoying soundtrack that I grew to despise with every molecule of my being, mostly because I was subjected to it as an eternal everlasting torment, but also because I had an Amiga and my computer was clearly superior in every way especially when it came to sound.
Anyway, hearing this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TexOZwatuLg - constantly caused me to associate all FM sounds, even in good music, with this cheap "wah wah wah ee ee wah wah wah" noise, which I've only partly shaken decades after the trauma. Also, when he wasn't playing that one, he was playing this Dune game (https://youtu.be/gOscXf0Fpmk?si=hUZ8g0GZ48CKfKzh&t=7394) with a more varied but equally cheap sound, and on top of that playing the game triggers the most repetitive samples ever devised by man. Reporting, acknowledged, reporting, acknowledged... oh, the torture.
Where was I? Ah, that's why I'm not a fan of FM synthesizers.