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Chapter 24 Ultrabeat 361
Stiffness controls the stiffness or rigidity of the string. In the real world, this depends on
the material the strings are made of and their diameter (or, more precisely: their speed
of vibration or response to being struck or plucked and so on). Rigid strings create an
inharmonic vibration where the overtones do not represent whole number multiples of
the fundamental frequency. These overtones are, in fact, slightly higher. Marked
increases in rigidity (stiffness) ultimately transforms the string into a metal rod.
Along the x-axis of the Material Pad you’ll find the value range for the Stiffness
parameter, and the value range for the Inner Loss parameter along the y-axis. To adjust
the parameters, click-hold on the dot in the Material Pad and move it.
Note: Click on the dot in the Material Pad while holding down Option if you want to
return the string parameters to their default values.
To the right of the Material Pad you’ll find the Resolution parameter. In contrast to the
other parameters of the Model oscillator, Resolution does not reproduce a pre-defined
real-world property of the physical model, but affects the modeling process itself:
higher values lead to an improved calculation resolution which results in more
overtones. Lower values reduce the precision of the calculations, leading to fewer
overtones and often to inharmonic spectra.