PIVOT Review
Fors hooked me up with their latest plugin Pivot, a three operator FM synthesizer with a lovely interface. If you’ve read my review of Tela, you’ll know how much I admire Fors’ UI work, great colors with a flat theme, nice fonts and fun graphics. The waveform displays are very fun here, giving you a glimpse of your resulting waveform. If FM scares you, Pivot is actually an incredible introduction to this method of synthesis. What comes to mind right away is the Digitone engine, which also uses three operators.
Over all, Pivot is a fairly simple synth, each operator has an ADSR envelope and feedback. There’s a filter that can morph between low pass, band pass, and high pass. A simple mod matrix giving you two additional envelopes and two LFOs. Everything is polished off with a detune control, stereo spread, and a pleasant distortion, no delays or reverbs in this one. I do apreciate the ratio controls giving you a large whole number and much smaller decimal values (I mean literally in size). I find setting the ratio values on some other FM synths to be a bit finicky at times in terms of the actual control regions.
I also liked how you can drag the release time of the envelopes to infinite, essentially just continuing from the sustain value. As for the routing, you basically get two possible algorithms that you can crossfade between, I was happy to see this could be modulated in the matrix. Finally, each operator can be randomized independently by clicking on their respective dice.
As for sound, it’s FM, it sounds like FM. There’s of course more nuance to synthesis than this, the envelopes are nice, the distortion adds some nice flavor as well. The big difference from one FM synth to another is modulation range. It seems there is no standard unit size being used across any FM synths. The FM amount or level always goes from 0 to 100, but 100 on one synth can be 30 on another. This isn’t to say that more range is always better, less range can give you more subtle precision. I plan to write more about this in the future in a dedicated article. As for Pivot, the range is nice, it’s not too much to be unwieldy, but not too little to be insubstantial.
Ultimately, I’d highly suggest Pivot for anyone looking to explore FM synthesis. I plan to write about this more as well in the future, but I find so many synths try to make “FM easy” but seem to just relabel the ratio controls and hide the algorithms adding even more confusion. I don’t think Pivot claims to “make FM easy” but I do suggest it as a starting point. We’ve all watched the FM tutorials, learning the signal paths and terminology is one thing, but actually taking the time to hear each combination of ratios and how they decay gives you a much better idea for how to actually explore FM synthesis. Sp with that in mind, stripping things down to three operators is a great place to start before branching out into FM synths with six or more.
You can pick up PIVOT from Fors’ website here: https://fors.fm/pivot