Expressive solo strings sound design

Hello, today we are going to create a lead string

sound

and why would we do that? There are a lot of sample libraries that do it and, uh, there's physical modeling stuff that does it pretty well. Okay, sample libraries are one thing, they are huge and require. a lot of RAM and they mostly take a while to load and are quite limited in terms of

sound

flexibility, so it's not so convenient to shape those sounds to your needs or create experimental sounds with a huge orchestra library, so on an SC I can do that, so yeah, the second thing is Expressions, so in a sample the Library expressions are pretty limited here, you can do slides and stuff easily and, um, yeah, and it's also an interesting training chain. in sound

design

, so it's also fun to do and The last thing is that I'm not going to use resonators here, so I'm not going to use mainly subtractive synthesis or even that, with a little twist at the end, but I hope it's fun and I hope it's interesting, so without further ado, let's start creating an oscillator.

I don't know when was the last time I created an oscillator in a video and here we have a speed of one and I create a middle note node that will drive this PL oscillator in pitch and um, I create a Lin gain and I connect the oscillator to it and I connect the gate to the Lin gain and I turn this up a little bit and create the outputs using pressing or Up this PLS output and here we have the most basic setup, so it's going to be just an S wave, but this is what we're going to use to create our sound of rope.

The first thing is to create a Legato effect, so let's create a Legato Node, so let's say the pitch comes in. We'll follow it with an envelope follower, but we'll monetise the envelope follower, so I put a KN here between 0 and 2000, maybe so 2 seconds is the highest we'll use and um, yeah. this we will multiply by the gate and delay the gate one sample this way if the voice is active and the gate was low in the previous position then the envelope follower will have zero attack and zero release when we hit a key and when we slide so it will have half a second of uh slide time and let me put one more envelope over here so the slide is a little more natural maybe one more this is completely a matter of taste and the hole comes out here so pit com sees the door goes in like this and the tone goes off and this should be a nice Legato effect and let's slide this just works.

What we want to do is involve velocity, so I remove this gate and recreate it so that pitch velocity is the gate. will be the input order and we may want to multiply this value by the inverse of the speed, so 1 1 - x, then if the speed is low then this view will be long, if the speed is very strong then the slide will be long. Be quick, so let's multiply this and listen to what we can do in this setup patching the speed and gate and listen, yeah, that's good, maybe two seconds or too much, maybe 1 second is enough, yeah, for me it is enough.

So the next thing we would like to have is maybe you know what I don't like, that the gate wire goes through the Legato, so I create a gate exit here and now I'll create an envelope follower that will follow this gate and here maybe I'll use it now not here I won't use it anymore I just give it a little bit at launch something like this could be working uh what I don't like is that um no, it's okay but maybe not, oh it is it's okay, it's okay , I don't care, okay, so let's create an nfo that will moderate the pitch so that it's a triangular LFO with a certain frequency and we just rescue it between minus one and one and connect it to the oscillator's pitch modulation is good, uh, probably we'd like to have some attack for this, so I create another FL envelope, I give it a gate and I place it here and I give it some attack and this is fine, but the frequency of this uh vbr is a little bit thetic so I give it I give a random LFO with 2 Herz and since the output here is between zero and one, this means that if we increase the frequency moderation we add one to its maximum, one Hertz of frequency moderation here, so this should be fine, right?

OK? it's good and we're going to give it a little bit more expression using the mod mod mod with the middle CC of one that we need to smooth, but oh no, we don't need to smooth it because it's included here since we have a previous envelope here, so we just need to multiply this door here by the M CC like this, that should work, let's move these a little bit higher and use this module. I put an LED here so we can see that the module is being used well and, yes. You might also want to affect the other four with this middle CC and for that I'll want to smooth it out a little bit, so I create a soft note here because this is not a non-interpolated value, so we might need to smooth it out a little bit. like this and uh, I just want to multiply the LFO with this value, this way, when the modulation is low, the LFO won't affect the tone a little less nice.

I don't know, I just play said tunes here and, yeah, currently The sound is a little static, so let's add some noise. Let's create a white noise oscillator and put a filter behind it. A one pole filter will do it and let's use a Theopus, the two pole Opus output. Because of this, this single pole filter has two unipole filters inside and let's turn the volume down nice and put a variable state filter here using step output B. This will simulate the loss that occurs in the body. Something like this sounds realistic, no, no, but it should, so this is pretty much um done now and here comes the twist.

I'll use the Reverb node and I'll connect this to the two inputs and I'll connect it to the gon and let's take the size to a really low value, let's increase the Decay the lp a little bit lower and Go up to the vet, it's funny, it's the same patch, but now It's not TR good or I don't know, David doesn't get it anymore, it's a rope and I'm sorry for playing, it's always said, but anyway, let's give it some space, so let's put it on. an fdn reverb here at the end and use stereo check that's too much yeah and yeah we could simulate this cut a little bit but we wouldn't do it that much so as of right now it's up to you, you can this size.

The value matters a lot, so you have a completely different string and also the amount of lopus filtering within the RB Mets and also the Decay which establishes how resonant your string is. Decay has artifacts, but the articulation is very nice and uh and you can go for a little bit higher values ​​on the size and yeah, that's basically it for this video. I'm going to share this patch on our Discord and I hope you found this interesting note. If I had wanted to, I could have. leave this oscillator out and use a simple strong car patch instead with h, where I would have cheated and created a swaave using the strong car CU which is also possible and then this would have looked like a physical modeling chain which is obviously OB.

No, I'm just using a reverb to emulate the body of the string because if you look at how the string moves, it's very much like an S wave if you think about it, that's why this works and the reverb is like the body of the string. the rope where the sun is and that is what we are simulating, not all riverb will do this, so if you try to recreate this patch on another Peter, it depends on what kind of RB they implemented, this is my own

design

here and it uses a structure circular composition but with Opus filters, so it's multiple filters from all steps, sharing the same feedback pass and creating circular feedback around them, so it's a bit complicated, but anyway, if you want to create such a sound, you can also do it on other images and, if you are always using Alpha, you can download it from our Discord or you can create it yourself.

Creating things is always fun, so I encourage everyone to create things and, yeah, that's it. Today I hope you found it interesting and fun and yes, thanks for watching, bye.