[sdiy] questions on string synthesizers

[Kylee Kennedy]

I have a book titled Music, Physics and Engineering that shows the
harmonics created by a few instruments. The Welsh Synthesizer Cookbook does
it for subtractive synthesis. Basically any book that examines the physics
and harmonics of musical instruments should cover some of that theory. I
believe a lot of instruments in String Synth are created by interpretation.
I mean the violin and cello usually sound very similar to me on the ones
I've played it's just the bandpass filters are set differently but in
reality you'd have different harmonics and overtones coming from the real
instruments because of their size and shape. This is more what Modal
Synthesis covers.

Kylee

P.S. the Music, Physics and Engineering book has probably a more current
more comprehensive replacement...I found it in a church book sale and I
always come back to it for random things I'm researching. It has a large
section on soundproofing that I recently looked up, but the computer sound
creation information is way outdated.



On Sun, Feb 19, 2017 at 11:32 PM, Elain Klopke <functionofform at gmail.com>
wrote:

> >I think they are essentially the same as old organs - the basic approach
> is to generate a square wave for each note, then optionally use a fixed
> filter (often just a resistor and a capacitor/inductor) to produce various
> different tones, then optionally combine those tones for each key to
> produce different timbres.
>
> Is there anywhere that shows what filter frequencies to use for what
> instrument?
>
> On Sun, Feb 19, 2017 at 7:08 PM, Adrian Corston <eidorian at aladan.net>
> wrote:
>
>> I think they are essentially the same as old organs - the basic approach
>> is to generate a square wave for each note, then optionally use a fixed
>> filter (often just a resistor and a capacitor/inductor) to produce various
>> different tones, then optionally combine those tones for each key to
>> produce different timbres.  The details of how this is done (which is what
>> you're actually asking about) varies from machine to machine - older
>> designs used multiple poles on the key switches to allow the tones to be
>> combined; newer designs used note keying chips which did the combining
>> internally.  There are almost certainly other techniques I don't know about.
>>
>> Many stringers also had effects such as phaser circuits, BBD-based
>> chorus, and vibrato (achieved by varying the clock on the top octave
>> generators) to produce the classic "string machine" sound.
>>
>> Fun fact: some organs produced white noise for their drum machines by
>> combining many unrelated (dissonant) tones (somewhat like the TR606/DR-110
>> cymbal sound that was generated by combining 6 square wave oscillators).
>>
>> The one thing I haven't been able to fully understand is how they did
>> fully polyphonic A/R envelopes.  I've been meaning to have a look at some
>> schematics at some stage but haven't gotten around to it yet.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> A.
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From:
>> "Elain Klopke" <functionofform at gmail.com>
>>
>> To:
>> <synth-diy at synth-diy.org>
>> Cc:
>>
>> Sent:
>> Sun, 19 Feb 2017 15:31:17 -0600
>> Subject:
>> [sdiy] questions on string synthesizers
>>
>>
>> How do the selectors for the various sounds work? Like with the violin
>> and cello, trumpet and tuba tabs or stops, you press the button and you
>> hear an aproximation of a violin sound, and you can add in the rest of the
>> sounds to get something orchestral. How is the string synth taking the raw
>> output from the top octive chip and subsequent dividers and transforming it
>> into the various instrument sounds? I assume there's some sort of filtering
>> going on, but I can't quite wrap my head around it.
>>
>> thanks,
>>
>> -Ian
>>
>>
>
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