Metal Clang

How it's made

Source

a steel bar dropped or swung onto a steel plate. Contact lasts well under 1 ms, so the strike is a broadband click (a high-passed noise burst of 0.2–2 ms) plus a short bar "tick" at about 3.2 kHz.

Body

the plate rings in many inharmonic flexural modes (ratios ≈ 1 : 1.59 : 2.14 : 2.65 : 3.5 : 4.3 : 5.6 : 7.1 : 9.0), not integer multiples. Low modes ring for about a second, upper ones die within 0.1–0.3 s, so the attack is bright and the ring settles into a few metallic tones. Each mode is a pair a fraction of a hertz apart (plate asymmetry), which gives a slow shimmer.

Envelope

instant attack, exponential decay per mode (T60 up to `ring`, 1.2 s by default); the whole render is closed by a fade so the one-shot ends at about 1.5 s.

Variation

`rng` mistunes every mode by ±0.8 % and varies the click, so each strike sounds slightly different; `pitch` is plate size, `brightness` the strength of upper modes, `hardness` the click edge.

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