Dramatic Organ Sting

How it's made

Source

a pipe organ with the drawbars pulled out, struck as one chord. Each pipe is a column of air driven by an edge tone; the speech is a 20 ms burst of breathy chiff (noise high-passed near 6x the pitch).

Body

every pipe is additive, partials 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 (a principal chorus plus a mixture) weighted by the drawbar setting; each partial is detuned a few cents and a slow tremulant (about 5 Hz, 0.6 %) adds life. A low-pass sweep opens in the first 80 ms so the sting hits bright, then settles.

Envelope

a sudden 12 ms attack (pipes speak almost instantly), a held plateau of about a second with a slight wind sag, then a 400 ms release when the keys come up.

Space

the room is part of the sound. A large hall (2-3 s decay) is wrapped around the chord so the tail rings on after the pipes stop; the tail is faded to silence at about 3 s.

Variation

`rng` detunes each pipe, shifts the tremulant phase and the chiff noise; presets change the chord type, register, drawbars and hall size.

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