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Table Of Contents
420 Chapter 24 Sculpture
Guitar
Guitar, lute, mandolin, and other plucked type instruments, including harps, can be
created from this basic patch.
Load your “plain vanilla patch.
Set the Voices parameter to a value of 6—theres only 6 strings on a guitar. Obviously,
pick 7 for a banjo, as many as possible for a harp.
Set Object 1’s Type to Impulse, if its not already there.
Activate Object 2 and set its Type to Pick.
Now move Pickup As position to the extreme right.
Move Object 2’s Pickup position to a value of 0.14.
Activate the Body EQ, and select one of the Guitar models.
Adjust the various Body EQ parameters. These have a major impact on the overall
brightness and tone of your guitar sound. (Suggestions—Guitar 2, Int—0.46, Shift
0.38 and Stretch0.20).
Finestructure should be at a value around 0.30 to 0.35—but use your ears to judge
this. Remember that an increase in the Finestructure value results in a greater load
on the computer CPU.
Click-hold on the Stereo Pickup button, and drag your mouse upwards—to increase
the perception of stereo width (a value around the 10 o’clock/2 o’clock mark is nice).
Activate the Filter, and select Lo Pass mode.
Adjust the Cutoff and Resonance parameters to taste. (suggestion—both at 0.81).
Adjust the Tension Mod slider upwards, and play the keyboard to see how the
momentary detuning effect caused by this parameter affects the sound. Set it to an
appropriate amount.
Set the Level Limiter to Both.
Save Setting as… with a new name.
You may have noticed that we departed slightly from the signal path of the Core
synthesis engine in the creation of this Setting. The reason for this is the major impact
that the Body EQ model has on the sound.
In some cases, like this one, it may be better to work slightly out of sequence, rather
than strictly follow the signal flow.
Obviously, this is but one guitar. You can make use of the Object Strength, Variation,
and Timbre parameters, not to mention repositioning the Material Pad ball to create a
completely different “tone” to your guitar.
For quick and easy mandolins, make use of the Stereo Delay (or Vibrato) to emulate the
double-strike picking that is associated with the instrument.