Most controls in Sine Machine are pretty straightforward. Enter Pitch Stiffness. Here’s a good mystery!
Mathematically perfect strings are of course perfectly in tune with themselves. But it turns out that all real strings push their harmonics sharp (for Physics Reasons™). The partials fan apart as they climb, each higher harmonic stretched more than the last.
Sine Machine’s Stiffness models this “real string” behavior, but also lets you go beyond real-life physics.
At a value of 0 the partials are perfectly harmonic, mathematically ideal.
At values of around 0.01 (basically as low as you can go on the slider) you’ll get something similar to a piano string’s stiffness. Perfect for plucked patches to sound a bit more “real.”
As you go up on the slider, the upper spectrum spreads progressively sharp and you end up with inharmonic, bell-like, metallic, until you finally reach “pretty much unusable.”
Want to read a Math paper about Stiffness? Here you go! 🤓 Sine Machine’s B is 0.1 * Stiffness.
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