Major String Swell

How it's made

Source

a section of bowed strings playing a sustained major chord. Each player is a bowed string, modelled as a band-limited sawtooth (bow stick-slip gives a 1/n harmonic series); every chord note is doubled by three players detuned by a few cents with their own slow vibrato, which makes the ensemble chorus.

Body

the instrument body acts as a low-pass that opens with bow pressure: the cutoff sweeps from ≈ 600 Hz to 2.5–6 kHz across the swell, so the harmonics bloom (spectral centroid rises). A gentle body peak near 400 Hz adds warmth; a high shelf cut keeps the top from getting steely.

Envelope

slow bow crescendo of ≈ 2.2 s with a convex curve, a short held peak, then a soft 0.9 s release as the bows lift; each chord note enters 0–90 ms apart so the section does not move as one block.

Variation

`rng` offsets the tuning (±3 cents), vibrato phase and rate and stereo position of every player; `root` transposes the chord, `chord` picks triad, open voicing or added ninth, `swell` sets the crescendo time and `brightness` the final filter opening.

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