One of the areas FM8 seems to fall short is re-producing some of the more rich, bright plucky string sounds that the DX/TX Synths were able to produce, these sounds are similar to steel guitar plucking sounds, with a very rich timbre, I tried for days to program this type of sound, but no luck, FM8 couldn’t do it.
Have you attempted to convert DX/TX7 or 802 sound banks into a format the FM8 can read? I did this with a carload of banks and have A/B’'d them to the original units and I have to tell you…they are spot on.
The problem is that NI made the conversion process as close to a nightmare as could be managed.
The latest version of FM8 can’t read DX/TX-7 (etc) sysex dumps generated from the original hardware. As a matter of fact, no version of FM-8 has ever been able to do that. But the old FM7 will. It gets worse. You have to use a sysex recorder like Sysex Librarian to get the dumps from the hardware into files the FM7 can read and save those out of FM7 in a preset file format that FM8 can read. And just to screw with you some more, the later versions of FM8 can’t read these. It’s a bug they never fixed. So you have to download an older version of FM8. Version 1.0.3 to be specific. This version will read the FM7 preset conversions. Once that’s done, the latest version of FM8 (v1.2.1 R1119) will see the converted libraries generated from the 1.0.3 version.
But…just so you can hear the conversions for yourself, I’ve stashed a few of the factory preset banks here:
http://78cf01617e3950417f0c-edf74d1b5a4206a253d3389ccc6c1dae.r38.cf1.rackcdn.com/FM7presets.zip
All you need to do is go to NI’s ftp site and download FM8 v1.0.3 and run that.
ftp://ftp.native-instruments.com/FM8/
Install the stand alone and make sure you don’t overwrite your newer version and its corresponding VST plugin. Move those somewhere safe first. Launch the v1.0.3 standalone (don’t do this from within Cubase) and under File, load the FM7 presets and see if they sound as good as the original. Dump the 1.0.3 VST plugin, put the newer one back and keep the older FM8 standalone in a folder separated from the newer one. The standalones can be run separately and don’t interfere with each other.
You can’t say I didn’t try.