[sdiy] Ideas for synthesizing an electric violin?

[Florian Anwander]

Hi Mike

> Anyway, I was wondering if anybody has done something like this before
> - running an electric violin through their modular..
> I would love to know what was done and hear some examples.
> Anybody?
I did 20 years ago. My father played violoncello and a friend played 
violin. I found the violin very difficult to handle in the modular 
system in a way, that it sounds interesting.
The emotional dynamic of the violin containe very much in the difference 
of the attacksound and in details of the overtones, where it is 
generally very bright. It is not that much in the variaty of the 
loudness or amount of overtones. Envelope followers or vocoders did not 
do that much. Also using a lowpassfilter was not that impressive. I 
found two modules quite nice with the violin:
1.) ringmodulator
  and
2.) comparator for converting the (generally spoken) saw waveform of the 
violin to (also pulse width modulateble) rectangle waveform. One does 
not expect the rectangle with the kind of playing of the violine.

Another nice tool (but nothing from the modular world) is a pitchshifter.
I could imagine that also some bit-crushing would cause some interesting 
stuff. Assumingly a Alesis Bitrman would be a good candidate for a violin.

Very urgent: its close to useless to try sound conversion if you hear 
the original sound of a real violin in the room. The sound of the 
instrument is that strong. It migh be much better with an electric violin.

Florian