Quilcom SIM-BANDURA

[Spogg]

Hello fellow FS addicts!

I knew nothing about the Bandura, which turns out to be considered the national instrument of Ukraine!

In my view it’s a very “sweet” sounding plucked instrument, so I’ve done my best to make it so.

Download:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/z90rl8ws ... dvpkw&dl=0

Video:
https://youtu.be/Npdt1EKounE

[billv]

Thanks Spogg ...sounds great....nice work...

[martinvicanek]

Great work again, Spogg! I never heard a real bandura, but your simulation sounds very natural, ethnic, not like a synth at all. I wonder how you approach the task to achieve such realism. Apart from reading stuff, do you take spectra or analyse the vibrations in the time domain? Or is it your Volcan ears that enable you to do this just by listening?
Whatever your technique, the result is outstanding! Again!

[Spogg]

Great work again, Spogg! I never heard a real bandura, but your simulation sounds very natural, ethnic, not like a synth at all. I wonder how you approach the task to achieve such realism. Apart from reading stuff, do you take spectra or analyse the vibrations in the time domain? Or is it your Volcan ears that enable you to do this just by listening?
Whatever your technique, the result is outstanding! Again!

Thank you Martin!

I never really codified my approach but, as you can imagine, the best tool I have is my ears. Here’s approximately what I do:

I find as much out about the instrument as I can.

I check to see if there’s any academic papers on synthesising the instrument, although in most cases I don’t find that very useful. But I may get clues about the sonic behaviour and makeup.

I listen to examples but generally seek one-shots. Sometimes I can find a video about how to tune the instrument, for those that can be tuned of course. That can give me one-shots. I also search for actual samples.

Sometimes I put these monophonic sounds into my Quilcom Wavemaker. For that I can get the spectrum and re-synthesise from the harmonics. I often randomise the phases and tweak the partial levels while listening to the original, until I get a decent match. In the case of the Bandura, I created a waveform from the early part of the sound and one from the tail end. I did that for the Bass strings and Treble strings separately, based on a couple of tuning videos. I provided 6 sets of waveforms, each with different partial phases and slightly modified partial amplitudes, to give a range of variations.

As we all know, the attack of a sound gives us the best audio cue as to the instrument’s identity. So I then focus on manipulating the envelope(s) and adding what I can to the Attack part. I look at the real envelope in an audio editor (my favourite is NCH Wavepad) to get the shape, and I often find that a plain exponential decay is usually insufficient. That’s where a lot of variation in my approach comes in. It can involve more than 1 envelope generator and/or a little FM (phase modulation) on the attack. I can add additional partials to the attack and so on. Each instrument has its own needs.
As I work, I play what I have so far alongside YouTube videos and make fine adjustments to get as close as possible.

I’ve found that the more SIMs I make, the knowledge gained from earlier stuff helps me to arrive at the best I can do much faster, which is simply the build-up of experience. I’m developing a sense of what should work and what won’t be so good.

[martinvicanek]

I would call your approach serious engineering at its best!