Instruments and Effects

Chapter 28 Sculpture 531
Although you can already recognize the sound of an electric bass, it doesn’t sound wiry
enough yet. Now it’s time to focus on the bass strings themselves.
In order to recreate the material properties of a set of round wound strings:
1 Move the ball in the Material Pad up and down at the left edge. Pay attention to how
the overtones react. Move the ball to the lower left hand corner. The sound should
vaguely remind you of the sound of a low piano string. As the overtones sustain too
long, the tone sounds somewhat unnatural.
2 Move the ball upwards until you hear an acceptable sound. Try the position shown in
the example:
Note: In general, a splaying of the overtones in low wound strings is typical. You can
recognize it by the slightly impure, metallic sound. This occurs because the partials
(overtones) are not exact whole number multiples of the fundamental frequency, but
rather they are shifted somewhat higher. An example of this effect in the real world of
electro-acoustic instruments are the low strings on a Yamaha CP70. This is overkill,
however, but your bass model will benefit from a small amount of this effect.
How to splay overtones in Sculpture:
1 Move the ball in the Material Pad gradually to the right. The sound takes on a more
pure, bell-like character.
2 To realistically simulate the splaying of overtones, try the following example setting: