I feel very lucky that the lovely people over at Sonicware have sent me a Liven 8Bit Warp to write some promotional material with. I'm still exploring what it can do but I've been very impressed so far. It's available here: https://sonicware.jp/
So here I'm exploring the FM engine to make pad sounds, and man can it do the dirtiest pad sounds! It has only a few controls for the FM engine, 6 in total if you don't count the common controls for envelope etc, but that still packs in the unusual ability (for a 2op FM synth) to control the modulators oscillator frequency with an LFO, that's what you're hearing as the tone shifts around slowly as I play. Pair that with the 8bit Warps super edgy sounding implementation of FM and it can produce some amazing tones.
The only reverb used here is the built in 'INF' reverb which is quite bright so that helps the top end shine. To my ear this almost ends up sounding organic in nature, which is pretty special considering it's one of the least analog piece of equipment I could have built this pad sound on.
This demo was made using one pass of the Liven 8Bit warps without any other external equipment used, except to capture the performance.