Transcription of the video above
All right, I’m not going to gaslight you and tell you this is the most realistic string sound ever, but you might be surprised to know it’s just a sawtooth wave. Now, I think this may be too subtle for Instagram, but what’s happening is pretty interesting. If we remove the reverb and this, you’ll see what we’re left with. Pure sawtooth. Well, maybe a little envelope.
The expressiveness you’re hearing is coming from here. This synth has a couple tricks up its sleeve and one of them is it moves between equal and just tuning. So here with just tuning, notes on their own are going to sound identical either way. But temperament is about what happens with intervals. For reasons I can’t go into here, you can’t have these two notes be in tune and also have these two notes be in tune. That’s where we get equal temperament, where we make everything a little out of tune.
String players don’t have to adhere exactly to either of those two systems on its own. You might choose to play this note, but tuned against something else, you might make an adjustment, and that adjustment might show up in your vibrato. So I grabbed a modulation source, in this case LFO2, and I set it to respond to the modulation wheel. LFO2 in turn modulates the temperament, which means when I turn this up, that goes up and that goes up.
The end result is that when I play two notes that fall together within the harmonic series, they’re stable. But when I change the modulation wheel, they begin to drift. And that’s more noticeable on notes like this than they are on notes like this. Which means as I play, my sawtooth string player is adapting contextually. And if we add a little reverb and put the envelope back on, I think that’s pretty cool.
