Tuning the String
The next step is to tune the string. Tuning has been covered repeatedly by the previous models, so we won’t spend much time on it now.
There is a new wrinkle here, though. Instead of tuning our cello to every fourth note, we’re going to tune it to every third note. Why? It’s because we’re also going to EQ our cello at every third note, and we’ll save some modules if we use the same addressing method for both EQ and tuning.
Tuning every third note will reduce the range of the instrument. Instead of a 61-note range, we’ll have a 46-note range (3 notes/slider * 15 sliders + 1 last slider). But that’s still enough for any single instrument.
Since we’re building a cello, we need to know a cello’s range. The lowest note a cello can play is C2. We’ll set our bottom range to Bb1, just to be safe. This makes our highest possible note G5, which is extremely high for a cello.
To accomplish this, we’ll make two changes when addressing the SeqCtr tuning modules. First, we’ll add 30 to the note number, so that Bb1 will become note “0”. After this, we’ll multiply the note by 1.3333, so that every increase in three notes is converted to an increase in four notes, causing the SeqCtr module to shift to the next slider. We can use a mixer to do this.
The patch is below.
Miscellaneous notes
- The bottom SeqCtr adjusts the loop filter’s cutoff frequency. This lets us calibrate the string’s brightness across the keyboard.
- The other stringed instruments (violins, violas, and contrabasses) all have different ranges. We can use this same system for tuning them. We’ll just change the starting note. There’ll be more about that on a later page.