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When people speak of "Hollowness" in a sound, it tends to mean weak even-order harmonics. Clarinet voices often get the same description.
Are you starting with a sawtooth wave? You might want to try some squares or pulses stacked at every other harmonic instead.
For instance, a full-strength square at C', a quarter-strength triangle or sine at G" (skipping the C" at the octave), etc.
Of course, this is just off the top of my head; I'm not sitting in front of my machine right now.
Envelope and vibrato/tremolo will have a lot to do with the realism, too, as well as velocity/pressure sensitivity and your playing style. Eventually you start sweating over spectral formants and the like, but you should really be able to get to 80% of a decent cello sound quickly with a minimum of modules.
But try experimenting with various pulse waves. As you sweep the Pulse Width control on a VCO, some really fantastic things happen to the harmonic spectrum (which is why PWM sounds so interesting), and there are points along the way that you might find interesting and close to what you're looking for. I seem to remember making a fairly reasonable cello once by staring with a 25% duty-cycle pulse and stacking one more VCO on top of that. A little LPF and some envelope tweaking and you're there.
-----Original Message-----
From: Brousseau, Paul E (Paul) [mailto:noise@...]
I suppose my question should be, then, how do I synthesize a cello sound (i.e., without using a sampler)? It sort of feels like it has a "hollow" sound-- notch filtered? The sound pitches downwards for each note, but I don't even know what sort of waveform to begin with.
Thanks again!
--PBr