Karplus Strong Synthesis

I’ve been experimenting with this over the last few days, and am really liking the results. There’s lots of tips in this old E-U thread: http://www.elektron-users.com/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=28&func=view&id=76721&catid=18&limit=10&limitstart=0

Anyone else played with this much? I’ve also been using the GND-SIN machine a lot…seems to give some warm, cello-like textures.

yeh this is always a fun technique to play around with

and depending on how much fine control you have over the relevant parameters, adding in some delay/reverb fx and doing random modulations and lfos/envs on various things can make some really super-weirdo sounds… like alien birds and hyperdimensional insects and shit like that

I keep meaning to mess with it, but then lose myself in the machine >.>

I surface a couple hours later wondering where my time went, but not really caring.

i don’t have a MnM any more but i used to use short delay times on everything now and then. high feedback… route LFO’s to various delay parameters… the delay is a chameleon of sorts.

i used to use the drums w/lot’s of short delay being modulated + high feedback/gain etc. it makes those drum sounds otherworldy.

the FM synth engines + delay with modulation can do some really weird stuff… not strictly karplus but in the ball park sort of…

Cool. I’m gonna try these out.

Thanks.

Can anyone post any examples?

At 7:00 minutes you hear one MnM Karpluss voice doing the deep bass (through a Moogerfooger filter) and two panned MnM Karpluss voices doing the harsh stringy thing through a Filterbank.

https://soundcloud.com/pseen/xmsmixmmxii

https://soundcloud.com/pseen/xmsmixmmxii

I was doing something like this with my MD last night, and was able to get some nice chord/pad sounds from a little cymbal hit! Pretty amazing what these machines can do.

Here’s a table showing the relationship between the delay values and the resulting notes. As far as I remember from when I took these notes, the values work independently of pattern BPM, so the notes will not be transposed at different tempos. I could be wrong, though…

Some of the notes are off by more than a few cents, especially the lower values where one single delay value constitutes an interval of several half notes.


I believe it’s all about a short sound bit, with the reverb making it a sustained pad sound. I may be wrong, but fuck it.