Pizzicato Sneak Loop

How it's made

Source

a string plucked with the fingertip (pizzicato). A Karplus-Strong string gives the harmonic series and its brightness-dependent decay; a 2-3 ms band-passed noise tick at 2-4 kHz is the nail/finger snap, and a short low-passed noise thump is the fingertip hitting the fingerboard.

Body

the instrument box adds broad resonances (air ~ 260 Hz, top plate ~ 520 Hz and ~ 1.3 kHz) via peak filters; a 70 Hz high-pass and a low-pass tied to `brightness` keep the tone soft and unobtrusive.

Envelope

every note is damped staccato by a fast exponential gate (70-260 ms, `length`), as if the plucking hand mutes the string: short, dry, never ringing into the next note.

Rhythm

16 steps per bar, notes on tiptoe off-beats with rests between them; a low octave pluck answers on the downbeat. The step length is snapped so the loop holds a whole number of bars. A descending chromatic creep in the second half of each bar gives the sneaking tension.

Variation

`rng` jitters note timing (up to 18 ms by `looseness`), strength, pan (+/-0.35) and tuning (+/-3 cents); presets change tempo, register, note length, brightness and bass weight.

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