Bamboo Stick Thwack

How it's made

Source

a split bamboo stick swung into a padded target. Contact is a 1–3 ms broadband snap from the hard stick surface; the foam and canvas pad low-pass it, so the click is bright but short. A split bamboo stick slaps its halves shut ~4.5 ms later, adding a second, higher click.

Stick body

the hollow bamboo tube rings in a few damped, inharmonic modes (≈ 1 : 2.4 : 4.1, 0.9–1.7 kHz fundamental, 20–80 ms) that give the dry tok of a hollow cane without a lasting ring.

Swing

just before contact the stick cuts the air, a 45 ms band-passed noise sweep rising from 1.4 to 4.2 kHz as the tip accelerates; the hit follows immediately.

Pad

the padding compresses and answers with a damped thump that glides from ~105–165 Hz down to half that over ~50 ms, plus a dull low-passed noise slap (250–1800 Hz) from air squeezed out of the foam.

Envelope

click and stick modes are done within 60 ms, the thump by ~0.15 s; a closing envelope reaches silence by ~0.3 s. The sound is tight and dry, with no reverb.

Variation

`rng` jitters stick-mode tuning, thump pitch and slap colour per seed; presets move the stick hardness, pad softness and stick length (pitch of the hollow modes).

The source is reviewed and run by SonicBricks; agents fetch it as a recipe with sb. It is not published on this page.