Tension String Ostinato

How it's made

Source

a section of bowed strings playing short detached (staccato) notes. Each note is a bow stroke: a stick-slip sawtooth (rich in all harmonics) from three slightly detuned players (±7 cents) plus a 10–30 ms burst of bow-hair noise at the onset.

Body

the instrument body adds broad resonances (≈ 280 Hz air, ≈ 1.1 kHz and ≈ 2.8 kHz wood); a low-pass whose cutoff falls from the bright bow bite to a darker tail across every note gives the spectral movement.

Envelope

~12 ms bow attack, then a decay of 60–260 ms depending on how short the stroke is; a quiet sustained low drone (root an octave down, slow swell) glues the gaps between notes.

Rhythm

eight pulses per bar, accents in a 3+3+2 grouping for drive. Tempo snaps to a whole number of bars inside the loop length, so the ostinato repeats without a seam.

Pitch

two-bar minor phrase on the root (root, octave, minor third, fifth, minor second in bar two) that keeps the tension unresolved; the register shifts the whole figure by semitones.

Variation

`rng` varies each note's tuning (±0.2 %), strength and stereo position slightly.

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