Steel Pan Note

How it's made

Source

a rubber-tipped mallet striking one dome-shaped note patch of a hammered steel pan. The strike is a 2–8 ms low-passed noise burst plus a soft thump of the whole bowl; a harder strike is shorter and brighter.

Body

the patch is tuned so its first partials are near-harmonic: fundamental 1, octave 2 and twelfth 3, with weaker inharmonic metallic partials at about 4.05, 5.2 and 6.9 that give the bright "ping". The fundamental rings longest (up to the ring time), the octave and twelfth about 60 % / 40 % of it, the metallic partials fade within 0.1–0.3 s, so the tone starts bright and settles into a pure singing note.

Shimmer

the neighbouring note patches and the bowl make every partial a pair of modes 1–5 Hz apart, which produces the slow amplitude wobble of a pan. The octave partial wobbles fastest.

Envelope

instant strike, exponential decay of each mode (T60 ≈ 1.2 s for the fundamental), and a short closing fade so the oneshot ends cleanly at about 1.5 s.

Variation

`rng` mistunes partials by ±0.15 % and varies the mallet burst; `pitch` sets the note, `brightness` the upper partial level, `ring` the sustain, `shimmer` the wobble, `strike` the mallet.

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