Crack Sweetener

How it's made

Source

a sharp collision (whip tip, snapped wood, hard strike) throws off a shock front. It is a 0.3–1 ms broadband click followed by a 5–30 ms burst of high-passed noise; nothing below ~1.5 kHz is needed because the sweetener rides on top of a separate body layer.

Layers

(1) click: white noise high-passed at 3–6 kHz with a 0.2 ms attack and ~2 ms decay; (2) snap: noise band-limited by a sweeping low-pass (14 kHz falling to 4 kHz) and a 1.8 kHz high-pass, 15–40 ms; (3) ring: two or three short, strongly damped resonances at 3–9 kHz (a thin splinter or shell) that add a glassy edge.

Envelope

the click is instant and gone within 5 ms, the snap decays exponentially over tens of ms, and the ring is a few ms to 60 ms; the whole event is over in about 0.2 s, ending with a short fade.

Spectral movement

energy starts at the top of the band and the low-pass sweeps down within 20 ms, as a real crack loses its highest frequencies first; a 12 dB/oct high-pass keeps it clear of the body layer.

Variation

`rng` jitters the ring frequencies by ±4 %, the sweep time by ±10 % and the layer levels slightly; `tone` moves the whole spectrum, `snap` sets the length of the noise burst, `ring` the resonant edge.

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