Wood Block Clack

How it's made

Source

two solid wooden blocks collide once. A 1.5–4 ms band-limited noise pulse models hard grain contact; a quieter 7–14 ms mid-band contact layer models the slightly uneven faces settling, without a second audible strike.

Body

both blocks vibrate: two independently detuned banks with fundamentals near 680 and 910 Hz at the default size, inharmonic bending ratios around 1 : 2.6 : 4.9 : 7.3. Their T60 values are 45–220 ms; upper modes damp faster. The second bank has different ratios and a 0.3 ms propagation offset.

Envelope

0.2–0.6 ms rounded onset, bright contact followed by a short woody ring. Contact bandwidth falls from 5–9 kHz to 2.2 kHz in 12 ms. The dry mono tail has no room reverb; a safety envelope reaches zero by 0.4 s in a 0.5 s render.

Variation

independent seeded contact noise, mode tuning within 1.5 percent, and block balance within 5 percent. Size sets bending frequencies, hardness sets contact length and bandwidth, ring sets damping, and edge sets the balance of upper modes to the fundamental. Presets cover crisp edge contact, large solid blocks, hand-muted faces, and small thin offcuts.

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