Modal Resonator

A bank of sixteen tuned resonators that rings in sympathy with whatever you feed it. Excite it with a click, a drum, noise, or a full mix and it sings back struck strings, plucked metal, bells, and glassy plates. This is a resonator in the Rings tradition: you don't play notes into it, you strike it and listen to the body resonate.

How it works

Sixteen parallel bandpass filters are tuned to a fixed 220 Hz (A3) fundamental and its overtones, then summed. Struct crossfades the overtones between two tunings: a pure harmonic series that sounds like a vibrating string, and a stretched, inharmonic set that lands in bell, plate, and wine-glass territory. Damp sets how sharply each resonator rings — higher values narrow every band into long, singing tails, with the upper modes always decaying a little faster than the fundamental for a natural roll-off. Tilt sets exactly how much faster those upper modes fade — the spectral brightness of the tail — while Dens thins or fills out the body by changing how many of the sixteen modes are actually ringing. The pitch is intentionally fixed; to retune the whole body, run it into a pitch shifter downstream.

Controls

  • Struct — morphs the material from harmonic and string-like at 0% to inharmonic, metallic, and bell-like at 100%. The single most important macro for the character of the sound.
  • Damp — resonator Q, from 5 (broad, fast-decaying, percussive) up to 100 (narrow, long-ringing, almost pitched). Output gain compensates as the bands narrow.
  • Tilt — the brightness of the resonant tail: how much faster the upper modes fade than the fundamental. At 0 every partial rings as long as the bass for a bright, even, metallic shimmer; sweep up toward 0.9 and the highs damp away quickly, leaving a dark, woody, fundamental-heavy pluck.
  • Dens — the number of active modes, from 2 (sparse, hollow, nearly pure-tone) up to 16 (the full, dense, richly metallic bank). Thin it out for flute- and glass-like bodies; open it up for clangorous, partial-rich metal.
  • Mix — dry/wet blend; 100% is the pure resonator, lower values fold the original signal back in to keep transients intact.

Inputs & outputs

  • inL / inR — the excitation signal, processed as true stereo. Two independent resonator banks share the same tuning but keep separate tails, so a stereo source stays wide. Transients work best: drums, plucks, clicks, granular grit, or noise bursts.
  • Struct / Damp / Tilt / Dens / Mix CV — voltage control over each knob; the signal adds to the knob position. Patch an LFO or envelope to sweep the material, ring time, tail brightness, mode density, or blend hands-free.
  • outL / outR — the resonated stereo result.

Tips

  • Patch an LFO or envelope into structcv to sweep a strummed string into a struck bell over the course of a note.
  • Short percussive hits excite the body cleanly; sustained pads will mask the ringing, so pull Mix back when feeding dense material.
  • Crank Damp toward 100 and the bank nearly self-pitches — feed it noise for ghostly tuned drones.