King of FM

What it does

A free instrument for iPhone, iPad and Apple Silicon Macs, with no purchase and no unlock behind it. Rather than an FM engine, it plays presets sampled from DX7 and SY77 hardware across two layers that mix, tune and pan independently with linkable envelopes, followed by reverb, chorus, phaser, distortion, synced delay, a stereo widener, auto pan, a filter LFO, a lo-fi crusher and a limiter. Preset banks come from several sound designers, among them Moby Pixel, Red Sky Lullaby, Marc Hupkens and The GarageBand Guide, and you can build and share your own.

In the demo

This episode covers a free update rather than the app itself. Jade plays through her own new bank of eleven dark pads, written around horror, suspense and the moods of favourite television, film and games, running the app in AUM with Cascadia after it. Each patch gets a short introduction, from Lost and Rage through to Hope.

Worth knowing

It is a preset walkthrough, so the controls barely get touched here; Jade covers those in an earlier full episode on the app. The bank itself is all pads, aimed at atmosphere rather than leads or basses.