Piano Sustain patch

OWL
#1

Hey guys,
I’ve been looking for an effect that could simulate the type of sound that pressing on a sustain pedal on an acoustic piano creates. This problem has obviously been solved (with the million samplers) out there, yet I seem to be having some trouble finding resources that would help me model the sound to get it into an Owl patch.

Anyone have any suggestions for where to get started?

-Wil

#2

Do you want to modify the sustain of samples or the sustain of the audio input ?

#3

I want to add a sustain-like effect to the audio input.

#4

from basic to more evolved :

  • 1 band compression sustainer (time domain processing)
  • multiband compression sustainer
  • resonating filters / delay lines (have a look at droneBox)
  • I am sure there are interesting ideas in the DAFX proceedings
#5

Some other ideas—

You could sample a short segment of the sound (fraction of a second), and loop it with crossfade, which is what the EHX Freeze pedal does, in simple terms.

You could perform a fourier transform on the sound at a point in time, which will give you several harmonics of different amplitudes. By re-synthesizing the sounds using sine waves for each harmonic at its particular amplitude, you will have a waveform which very closely approximates the original sound. IIRC this technique is known as “spectral freezing”. Here’s a Max/MSP video tutorial on how to achieve this effect in that environment, but it should be not too horrible to implement in C.