Modal synthesis is one of the most common synthesis methods employed in physical modeling — the attempt to recreate the sounds of real-world objects. You may have come across this approach to synthesis in Mutable Instruments’ Rings, or its derivatives.

But if you watched the last installment in the Zynth Zecrets collection, on pinged filters, you may also have a sense of deja vu: the form of modal synthesis explored in this video is sort of like a pinged filter, but taken to the max. Once again, we have an exciter made from either noise or a sawtooth oscillator. But instead of one filter, five are used. Each one is tunable to create different partials, and when these partials — or part of the tone — are combined, the result can be very realistic struck or tapped sounds.

All sounds can be broken down — or decomposed — into sine waves; here, we have the inverse: making novel sounds from sine wave partials and taking advantage of the very natural decay of the resonating filter to mimic acoustic instruments.

So, modal synthesis allows us the opportunity to really shape the timbre of our struck sound in a way that the simple pinged filter cannot. That level of detail, of course, has a trade-off, as a modal synthesis costs more in CPU and takes more time to tune than the pinged filter. You can also get even more complex than I go into in this video, by adding more partials (via more filters), and even tuning the resonance and amplitude of each — but I’m pretty happy with the sounds that can be made using just a few partials.