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Tubular Bell

A single orchestral tubular bell strike with a bright mallet attack and a long, slowly beating tail

kind
one-shot
length
5.90 s
downloads
0
id
RTFN48FHVB

one-shot · 5.90 s · 0 downloads · 0 likes

0.00 / 5.90 sMP3 preview · Soft felt mallet
Preset
Spectrogram of “Tubular Bell”, Soft felt mallet preset
Spectrogram of “Tubular Bell”, Soft felt mallet preset: time left to right, frequency bottom to top.
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Tweak

renders in the CLI · WAV

Change parameters to build an exact command. Your agent runs it with sb and gets the WAV.

Command
$ sb get RTFN48FHVB@1 --preset soft-felt -o tubular-bell.wav

How it's made

Source
a hard rawhide or wooden mallet striking the capped top of a hanging brass tube. The strike is a 1–3 ms broadband click plus a ~15 ms band-passed "clank" of the cap; a harder mallet is brighter and shorter.
Body
the tube rings in free-free flexural modes with frequencies ∝ (n + 0.5)². Relative to the strike tone (mode 5 = 1) the modes sit at 0.21, 0.40, 0.67, 1, 1.40, 1.86, 2.39, 2.98, 3.64, 4.37, 5.2. Modes 4–7 are ≈ 2 : 3 : 4.2 : 5.6, so the ear hears a virtual pitch well below the strike tone.
Decay
low modes ring longest (up to `decay`, several seconds), high modes fade in a fraction of it, so the attack is bright and metallic and the tail turns pure and mellow (spectral movement).
Beating
a real tube is slightly asymmetric, so each mode is a pair of modes a fraction of a hertz apart; the sustain shimmers slowly (`beating`, 0.2–2 Hz).
Variation
`rng` mistunes the modes by up to ±0.2 % and varies the click; presets change tube size, mallet hardness and ring time.
Parameters
ParameterRangeDefaultUnitControls
pitch260 – 1000523HzPitch
decay1.5 – 74.5sRing time
brightness0 – 10.55—Brightness
beating0 – 10.4—Beating
strike0 – 10.6—Mallet hardness
seedint1—Variation, reproducible

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

Credits and creation history (JSON)
Revision history1
  1. r12026-10-24engine 1.0.1use('RTFN48FHVB@1')

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