The Quilcom SIM-GANGSA

[Spogg]

Hello!

Someone suggested I have a go at doing a Gangsa instrument which led me to find out that there seems to be two types of instrument with that name, both of which are instruments found in Gamelan ensembles in Indonesia. One is a metal xylophone and the other is a flat gong. I looked into Gamelan and found that there are lots of metallophones involved, so it seemed a good idea to make a synth which could be sufficiently flexible to have a stab at all of them. I won’t go into more detail here because there are lots in the User guide and Background info folder.

This fsm is another example of me using purely mono blue for the synth. This means that all 12 notes are constantly running (using mono4) which means the resting CPU is higher than for a poly version playing just a few notes at any one time. But the big advantage is that the CPU doesn’t increase according to the number of notes sounding, which is important considering the long decay times and possibilities of playing big glissandos which would lead to note-stealing and premature termination of sounds.

Download it here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rlqsnzpjbx1rl ... 1.zip?dl=0


Here’s my video:

https://youtu.be/n1uEXhcRp0A

[Tepeix]

Beautiful, thanks for the sharing

From what i hear each note could make harmonics that are related to the scale that we use ?

[Spogg]

Beautiful, thanks for the sharing

From what i hear each note could make harmonics that are related to the scale that we use ?

Thank you!

In the plugin all the notes use the same harmonic (mode) ratios based on the fundamental pitch. This is almost certainly not the case for real instruments. Each bar or gong would very likely have a subtly different balance of modes and amplitudes. This is pretty normal for acoustic instruments whereby different pitches have different timbres. I usually address this by some sort of pitch scaling, but it involves compromise between authenticity and practicality (and CPU use!).
Technically I could have provided a bank of knobs for each note, but I couldn’t imagine anyone being bothered to carefully adjust 192 knobs! I suspect most folk just want to load a plugin and try the presets and maybe tweak a few macro parameters.