Hi Clemens, the model has a great expressive range, and it sounds fantastic.
It would be amazing to hear it produce sounds, where the continuing pressure and friction of a bow can control a similar range between stable tonality and inharmonicity taking over.
Thank you so much for your very exciting work!
Julian
Hi @Prophonic welcome to the forum.
With EXC!TE CYMBAL PRO this should be possible using the side chain input. Or have I misunderstood the question?
Hi Max,
Thank you for the kind words. So you are describing a live input of a string played with a bow via external input? Would the plugin just accept the first few ms or a constant feed?
In that case it would be great to use Exc!te like an insert effect plugin and send any audio through it in realtime.
My original question was rather basic, if it was feasible for in the future for user to add their own exciter samples to the existing ones, save them in a folder and have the plugin reference that folder. Greetings.
Yes exactly, the PRO version of the plugin has a sidechain-input which you can feed continuous excitation. So for example you can put a Piezo-mic on a sheet of vernier, plastic, or cardboard, and then use a bow on the edge of that vernier.
For what you are describing, you could use a sampler, trigger your samples and feed that into the sidechain of the PRO plugin to get the functionality of the original question.
Hi Julian,
To chime in - yes the pro version definitely gets you very close to a real bowed interaction. Most importantly it is really made for sonic exploration in the many ways you can excite the resonator. To be fair there are a few more words to say about an exact model for a bowed interaction: when you bow a string or any other resonator the interaction is two-way, the bow sends impulses to the resonator, but the resonator also sends forces back to the bow. I’m not sure how the back-interaction could be modeled with a sidechain input. So this is a bit beyond the scope of the current plugin. All impact types of interaction, where the exciter and resonator don’t couple too much, sound excellent on the current version of the plugin. Sending a sine wave into the sidechain and changing it’s frequency also nicely excites all kinds of harmonics and inharmonics. You get a similar shimmering non-linearity as you would get, when you bow it, actually.
Greetings, Clemens
Amazing, thanks to both of you for the detailed explanation.
From my violin lessons I remember 3 (or even 4) parameters defining how a bow does contribute to producing sound: pressure, speed, material (horse hair or col legno), angle (maybe a sub category to material, but it makes a difference if you bow with just some hair vs all of the surface).
So as I understand Clemens - all of this including the dynamics in play over time would factor into the resulting sound including “build up” or what I call “the memory effect?”
It definitely sounds like I need the pro version.
Which brings me to my other point, if you could consider creating a similar model for tam tam / gong.
Here with tam tam rolls this memory effect plays an important roll, the resulting sound very much depends on the question if and how much the tam tam is still vibrating from any prior excitation.
Or would it be easier to add parameters to the cymbal model like thickness and material (alloy or one kind of metal?) and shape to craft gongs from it?
Afaik a gong is tuned while a tam tam is too inharmonic, assumingly this has to do with shape and material.
Thank you for your patience with me, guys.
Yes, definitely. I would say to pick up fine details of the bow interaction it would make sense to use a highly sensitive, possibly battery powered, piezo preamp.
Good question. From my perspective it makes sense to do dedicated software for different models because there are so many parameters and fine details that it is easy to get lost and not arrive at pleasing intermediate models. But this is an open question to be explored, really!
I have an electric violin with Fishman pickups. Should work well, thanks!
Dare I whisper Waterphone?
For excitation of the plug-in through the side-chain, you ideally want just the excitation noise and let the plug-in add the resonance. Any resonance of a string or body already in the excitation signal will compete with the resonator in the plugin. So if your goal is to have a sound which resembles a cymbal being bowed on its edge, you might get more realistic sound with a piece of plywood and a piezo on it, then using a violin. The later fed through the plug-in probably sounds like a cymbal is attached to the body of a violin.
You could also try to filter all sinusoidal components of the sound to only use to the residual noise for excitation. But experiment yourself, you might get interesting and otherworldly results!
Great points. Or excite the hollow corpus instead of the string/bridge system and use a mute on the bridge.
Thank you for that thought.