Authoring a pluck

A pluck is a short, percussive note with a sharp attack and a quick decay. It is the opposite of a pad: where a pad swells and holds, a pluck speaks and is gone. Plucks work well in arpeggios and fast rhythmic parts.

Test a pluck by playing fast repeated notes rather than single ones. Most of what goes wrong with a pluck only shows up once the notes start overlapping.

Each control below gets a start value and a range to try, and each entry says what happens when you cross an edge. The ranges come from what the instrument is, not from a survey of our presets. See how to read these tables for what the provenance tags mean.

Voice

• Voice Mode (acoustic fact). Each note must ring on after the next one starts, the way the strings of a guitar keep sounding together. In Mono a pluck loses its tail every time you play, which is the one thing a pluck cannot spare.

Oscillator

• Osc1 Mode (acoustic fact). Karplus-Strong is a plucked-string model, so it is the physical route and the one that sounds convincing with the least help. The other two are variants rather than settings, because each takes the rest of the patch with it: Wavetable gives up the string and asks the envelopes to do its work, and Modal swaps the string for a struck bar. Both are written out below.
• Osc1 KS Damping (acoustic fact). How fast the string's energy is absorbed. Low damping rings like a steel string; high damping is a muted, palm-damped note that is gone almost at once.
• Osc1 KS Pick Pos (acoustic fact). Where the string is plucked. Near the bridge (low values) the tone is thin and nasal because the pluck excites the high partials; at the centre it is round and hollow, because plucking at the midpoint cannot excite the even harmonics at all.
• Osc1 Detune (acoustic fact). A pluck is defined by its transient, and detuning smears exactly that. Keep it tight.

For a richer pluck, give the oscillators separate Mod Envelopes so a sharp transient, a fuller body and a longer ring each decay at a different speed. Layering a fast-decaying click over a slower-decaying tone is what makes a pluck feel struck rather than switched on.

Filter

• Filter Type (production convention). A low-pass, because on a pluck the filter's job is to take the top off the ring while leaving the attack alone. LP12 keeps more of the click if the strike is sounding dull, and MGLow24 adds the ladder's low-end weight. Comb is the exception and belongs to the struck variant below: driven hard it stops being a brightness control and becomes the tuned body the note rings in, so the two rows after this one no longer describe what you hear.
• Filter Cutoff, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (acoustic fact). A pluck lives in its attack, and the attack is broadband. Below about 2000 Hz the click that makes it read as plucked is gone and the note becomes a short pad.
• Filter Reso, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (acoustic fact). A pluck already has a strong transient. A resonant peak on top of it rings on after the note should have stopped.

Amp envelope

• Attack (acoustic fact). A struck or plucked string releases all of its energy at the moment of the strike. Any measurable attack time contradicts that.
• Decay (acoustic fact). The decay is the whole character, because it is the whole note. At 0.1 s it is a dry tick; at 1.2 s it is a long ringing string. This is the control to move first.
• Sustain (acoustic fact). Not negotiable. A plucked string has no energy source once it is released, so it cannot hold a level while the key is down. Any sustain at all and the note never goes away, which is a key sound, not a pluck.
• Release (acoustic fact). Lifting the key is damping the string with your hand, so it is short but not instant.

Movement

Movement over the note: front-loaded, widest at the attack, settling as the note rings (acoustic fact).

A plucked or struck body is chaotic at the moment of excitation and then settles: the string is still crossing itself, the partials have not yet sorted into a decay, and all of that is gone within a few hundred milliseconds. The movement belongs to the attack. A pluck whose movement continues at the same strength into the tail sounds like a pluck with an effect on it, because a real one has nothing left to move by then.

How to build it: ModEnv1 with attack near zero, decay 0.4 s to 0.8 s and sustain 0, routed either straight to the timbral target or into an LFO's depth when the movement should be a wobble that narrows.

Three of the rows below are routings and four are the envelope that drives the first of them. Mod Env 1 is a separate envelope from the amp envelope, and the relationship between the two is the whole technique: its decay is set shorter, so the filter finishes closing while the note is still sounding.

• Mod Env 1 to Filter Cutoff (acoustic fact). With a decay faster than the amp envelope's, the filter closes while the note still rings, so the pluck darkens as it decays. That is what a real string does: the high partials are absorbed first, so a ringing string grows duller as it dies. This filter movement is most of what makes a pluck read as plucked.
• Velocity to Filter Cutoff (acoustic fact). A harder pluck excites more upper partials.
• Velocity to Master Volume (acoustic fact). Soft notes quieter, hard notes louder. On a pluck this matters more than on any other sound, because you tend to play many notes in a row and without it the passage sounds mechanical.
• ModEnv1 Atk (acoustic fact). The envelope driving the filter has to arrive with the strike, for the same reason the amp attack does. A filter that opens even slightly after the note has started puts a swell on the front of a sound whose whole identity is that it has none.
• ModEnv1 Dec (acoustic fact). Set this shorter than the amp decay, and that relationship is the point rather than the number. The filter then finishes closing while the note is still ringing, so the tail grows duller as it fades, which is what a real string does. If you lengthen the amp decay for a longer ring, lengthen this with it and keep it behind.
• ModEnv1 Sus (acoustic fact). Zero, so the filter contour runs once and is finished. Any sustain here holds the filter open for as long as the key is down, and the darkening that makes the note read as plucked never happens.
• ModEnv1 Rel (acoustic fact). Shorter than the amp release, so releasing the key never opens the filter back up on the way out.

If you are using Karplus-Strong, route velocity to KS Brightness as well. That varies how hard the string is struck rather than only how bright the filter is afterwards, so soft notes are genuinely played softer instead of being played the same way and then filtered.

Effects

• Reverb Size (production convention). Small. A large bright tail on a fast plucked passage fills the gaps between the notes, and the gaps are what make the part rhythmic.
• Reverb Damp (production convention). Damping the tail's highs keeps the reverb behind the transient rather than on top of it.
• Delay Mix (production convention). Gives the pluck space to ring into without lengthening the note itself.

Variants

Build the base sound above, then apply the overrides below. Everything not listed stays as it was.

Both variants here are timbres: they change what the note is made of and leave the articulation alone. That is the point of a pluck. The sharp attack, the absent sustain and the decay that is the whole note carry over unchanged, and only the material speaks differently. You can take one of them, and taking both is not meaningful, because a note is made of one material.

Wavetable pluck

What the note is made of (timbre). Everything not listed below is unchanged from the base pluck. A preset claims this band by declaring "timbre": "wavetable" in its tags; until it does, the base band still applies to it.

The other route to a pluck, and the one to take when you want a tone the string model cannot make. Karplus-Strong gives you a string and then argues with you about it: the model decides what the partials do, and the controls that shape them are the string's own. A wavetable has no opinion. It holds whatever tone you load and stays there, so the pluck comes entirely from the envelopes rather than from the physics. That is the trade. You give up the ring that sounds convincing without effort, and you gain a timbre you choose. Note that KS Damping and KS Pick Pos are not merely set differently here: the wavetable engine does not read them at all, so they are inert.

• Osc1 Mode (production convention). The whole variant is this one switch. Everything else below follows from the string model no longer being there to shape the note for you.
• Osc1 WT Pos, when Osc1 Mode is Wavetable (production convention). Near the start of the table, where most factory tables keep their simpler waveforms. A pluck is heard through its transient and its decay rather than through the steady tone, so a complicated frame buys less here than it does on a pad. Past about 60% the added partials survive into the tail and the note starts ringing like a pad with a fast attack.
• ModEnv1 Dec (production convention). Faster than the base band, because the filter now has to do the work the string model was doing. Karplus-Strong loses its high partials on its own as the note decays; a wavetable holds its full spectrum until something takes it away. That something is this contour, so it has to close harder and sooner than it does on the string.
• Filter Cutoff, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (production convention). Lower than the base band. The string model's excitation burst is broadband for a few milliseconds and then gone, so it can sit under an open filter. A wavetable is broadband for the whole note, and left this open it reads as a bright sustained tone with a fast envelope on it rather than as something struck.

Struck pluck

What the note is made of (timbre). Everything not listed below is unchanged from the base pluck. A preset claims this band by declaring "timbre": "struck" in its tags; until it does, the base band still applies to it.

A plucked string is not the only thing that speaks and then dies. Struck metal and struck wood do the same, and the articulation carries over unchanged: sharp attack, no sustain, a decay that is the whole note. What changes is the material. Here the note is not a string at all. A Modal oscillator supplies inharmonic partials, and a Comb filter at high resonance rings at its own cutoff, so the filter stops being a brightness control and becomes the tuned body the strike excites. That is how a real pipe, rim or shell works: something hits it, and the body decides the pitch. For the deeper treatment of inharmonic sound, including how the four metallic timbres differ from one another, read the Metal section on the bass page. It applies at any register, not only a low one.

• Osc1 Mode (acoustic fact). A struck-idiophone model. It rings the way a struck metal bar does without further shaping, where the string model would insist on a string. KS Damping and KS Pick Pos are inert here, because Modal is a different physical object and does not read them.
• Osc1 Modal Inharm, when Osc1 Mode is Modal (acoustic fact). How far the partials are stretched away from the harmonic series. This single control is what the ear hears as metal: partials that do not line up with whole-number multiples of the fundamental have no pitch to fuse into, so they are heard as material rather than as a note. Below about 30% the object reads as a tuned bar or a wooden block, which is a legitimate sound but no longer a metallic one.
• Osc1 Modal Damp (acoustic fact). How fast the body absorbs the strike. This is the modal equivalent of the string's damping and it sets the length of the ring, so it works with the amp decay rather than instead of it. High damping is a dead, muted knock; low damping rings on and needs the amp envelope to stop it.
• Filter Type (acoustic fact). Driven hard, a comb rings at its cutoff, so the filter itself becomes the tuned body that the strike excites. This is why the base Filter Cutoff and Filter Reso bands do not apply here: neither control is describing brightness any more.
• Filter Reso, when Filter Type is Comb (acoustic fact). Very high, which is wrong everywhere else on this page and correct here. The base band caps resonance at 30% because a peak that rings on outlasts the note. That is exactly what is wanted once the peak is the instrument: the resonance is no longer an artefact sitting on top of the sound, it is the body doing the sounding. Under about 60% the pipe stops ringing and you are back to a filtered noise hit.
• Filter Cutoff, when Filter Type is Comb (acoustic fact). With the resonance this high the cutoff is a pitch, not a brightness: set it to the note the hit should ring at, and 261.6 Hz is middle C. Reading this row as a brightness is the single most common way to get a struck sound wrong.
• Comb Mode (acoustic fact). Closed is a quarter-wave pipe: it passes odd harmonics only, which is the hollow, clarinet-like tube a struck pipe actually is. Open passes every harmonic and sounds fuller and more ordinary. Closed is the one that sounds struck.

Both variants leave the Movement section alone apart from the one row each names. The filter contour is still what makes the note read as struck, whatever it is struck on.