Play a physical instrument

bahn's Piano, Guitar and Violin are physical models. Reading the parameter reference tells you what each control does. This page gets you to the three sounds these instruments exist for, which no list of controls will lead you to on its own.

Each patch below names exact values. Reach the sound first, then move.

Two things that make reaching a sound quicker

A note you type sounds at once. You do not have to play the pattern to hear what you just entered. It sounds on the node whose pattern you are editing, whether or not the song is playing, and whether or not that pattern belongs to the song. The key that enters a note-off sounds too, so you hear the release as well as the attack.

Ctrl+L mutes everything except the node you are on. Press it in the sequencer or in the pattern editor to hear one instrument alone. Press it again to bring the rest back. Any nodes you had muted by hand stay muted — solo does not forget them.

An instrument can have a card of its own. Put a second Output node in the graph and wire the instrument to it. The mixer then shows a second lane, with its own Device button. See Send two mixes to two cards.

1. Hear a guitar behave like a guitar

The thing to listen for is not the timbre. It is the strings interfering with each other.

1. Add a Guitar node and connect it to your Output node.
2. Write an open chord down one pattern column — E2, A2, D3, G3, B3, E4 — one note per row.
3. Set Sympathy to 00 and play it.
4. Set Sympathy to FF and play it again.

With Sympathy at zero you hear six independent strings. With it at maximum the chord becomes one instrument, because each string is picking up energy from the others through the bridge.

Now play a single low E with Sympathy at FF. The other five strings start ringing on their own. That is the whole point of the control: they do not have to have been played.

Then set Damp to FF and play the chord again. That is your palm on the strings at the bridge.

2. Build a supersaw-style sustain out of one bowed note

The violin is not for string sections. It is for a note that will not stop.

1. Add a Violin node.
2. Write one row: Note = A4, BowSpeed = 90, BowForce = 50, BowPos = 58.
3. Leave the next sixteen rows empty and play.

The note sustains, because a bow is a continuous energy source rather than something that hits the string once.

Now shape it without writing another note:

• Put BowSpeed = E0 on row 4. The note swells.
• Put BowForce = 20 on row 8. The tone thins toward a surface sound.
• Put BowForce = E0 on row 12. The bow presses too hard and the note chokes.
• Put BowSpeed = 00 on row 16. The bow lifts and the note ends.

That last step is the one to remember. A tracker row carries no key release, and a bowed note never decays on its own, so BowSpeed at zero is how you finish a phrase. NOTE_OFF also works if you want everything to stop at once.

Finally, set VibratoDepth to A0 and VibratoRate to 80, and play the long note again.

3. Resize an instrument while it is playing

This is the control that has no equivalent on a sampler.

1. On any of the three instruments, play a note that rings for a while — a low piano note with Pedal at FF works well.
2. While it is still sounding, put Scale = 00 on the next row, and Scale = FF four rows later.

The instrument gets bigger and smaller underneath the note. The tone changes — larger is deeper and purer — and the pitch does not move, because a bigger piano is not a lower piano.

You can throw Scale from one end to the other in a single row. It does not click.

Where to go next

• Try the guitar's String lane parameter to voice a chord up the neck instead of across it.
• Try the violin with BowPos near F0, which is bowing close to the bridge: bright, loud and much harder to keep speaking.
• Try Scale on the violin with the pattern transposed down an octave and a fifth. That is a cello.