Now, even with a measly thousand FM patches, you are probably going to rapidly realize that there’s a lot of duplication, even if none of the patches are precisely identical. Below are the directory names of the top level: Each of those files is a DX7 bank which may contain (and usually does contain) 32 patches. In this zip file we have nearly 12,600 files that unzipped occupy a healthy 34 M of disk space. How many patches are in the file? I hesitate to even estimate, but here’s the lowdown. The collection is contained in the file DX7_AllTheWeb.zip, found here: Boy, did I come across a whopper! No doubt, this is not the only collection of FM patches available for free download, but once I found it, I felt no incentive to look any further.

Native Instruments FM8 (and FM7 before it)Īlthough I’ve had FM8, Sytrus and Rhino sitting on my DAW for years now, it was the acquisition of Arturia’s DX7 V (as part of a very nice Christmas present) that motivated me to look for something I knew to be readily available: a freely downloadable collection of DX7-compatible FM patches.

The list of such instruments reportedly includes (but may not be limited to): A number of FM softsynths have the ability to import patch banks in the form of SYSEX files that were originally created for the venerable Yamaha DX7.

This month’s freebie has been around for quite some time, but I was recently motivated to explore the availability of free FM patches on the web and immediately came across it. If you have an appetite for FM synth patches, it had better be a very big appetite. This may be the biggest, most content-laden freebie ever to come your way.

Fm8 synth