Kalimba Flourish

How it's made

Source

a thumb-piano (kalimba) with steel tines on a hollow wooden box. A thumbnail flicks each tine; the strike is a 1–3 ms high-passed noise tick, softer for a thumb pad and sharper for a nail.

Body

a clamped-free tine is inharmonic: fundamental 1, a bright ping at ≈ 6.3× and a faint one at ≈ 17×. The fundamental rings 0.5–1.4 s, the ping dies in about a fifth of that, so the attack is metallic and the tail is pure. The wooden box adds a damped hollow resonance around 260 Hz, excited by every pluck, plus a very short low-passed thump.

Flourish

a rising pentatonic run that overshoots to the octave and falls back. Note onsets follow a bouncing pattern: gaps shrink by a `bounce` ratio, then the last gap relaxes so the final note lands as a tail.

Envelope

each note decays exponentially and rings over the next ones; the overall gain closes 0.06 s after the longest ring so the oneshot ends cleanly.

Variation

`rng` detunes each tine by ±0.3 %, jitters timing by a few ms and varies note strength.

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