Retro Ray Gun

How it's made

Source

a 1950s B-movie prop ray gun, voiced the way the era's theremin and oscillator-tube effects were made. A pure sine carries the pitch, a quieter sine an octave up adds the hollow "tube" colour, and a second sine detuned by about 0.8 % beats slowly against the first so the tone shimmers instead of sitting still.

Body

a vibrato of about 11 Hz, deep at the start and calming toward the end, wobbles the pitch in semitones (so the wobble stays musical while the pitch falls). A thin band of air noise, band-passed at about 3x the pitch, rides the same sweep as the discharge sizzle, and a short sine thump gives the "kick" of the trigger.

Envelope

the pitch falls exponentially from the start note to a low end note over most of the length, steep at first and flattening out. Level rises in 4 ms (no click), holds, then fades into a long smooth release; the sizzle and thump die much sooner than the tone.

Variation

`rng` shifts the start pitch by about 2 %, the vibrato phase and the detune; parameters set the start pitch, drop depth, wobble depth and speed, length, and the amount of sizzle and thump.

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