Chords with no keyboard

The comb-bank chapter ends on "strings, chords, drones, and gestures; no guitar required" — this recipe supplies the chords. tap.5comb~'s five voices tune in Hz (freq1..5), which means voicings are numbers you can keep, trade, and morph between; below is a small book of them, plus the excitation and morph craft that turns a filter bank into an instrument.

The mechanics cited here — ring time on a log map (20 ms–100 s), Hermite tuning, warp's stretched partials, phase's midpoint pluck — are measured and explained in five strings, no guitar and its machine chapter.

Voicings to keep

Tunings in Hz; MIDI equivalents in parentheses for orientation. The notes message tunes a voicing in one gesture — up to five MIDI note numbers, fractional allowed, so just-intonation intervals land exactly (notes 45 52 57 60.86 64 is the major glow with its true 5/4 third at 275 Hz) — and the Hz attributes remain for exact ratios like the bell plate.

Masters make voicings performable: freq (0..2) transposes the whole bank proportionally — chords stay chords under the glide — and res/lp scale ring and brightness bank-wide.

Ringing them

• Drone: res1..5 85, lp toward 5000. Feed it anything quiet and sustained — pink noise at low level, a field recording, your room tone. At res ≈ 100 the bank sustains essentially forever; the input stops being audio and becomes bowing pressure.
• Pluck: res1..5 around 60–70 and excite with clicks or a sparse tap.808.rim~ (@model claves) pattern — every tick strums the chord. Drums work; speech works eerily well (the chapter's "resonator chord").
• Strings, stiffened: warp 40 stretches the upper partials sharp — piano-ish, then bell-ish — while the compensated main tap keeps the pitch put. Pair with lp near 3000 for the felt-hammer version.
• The midpoint pluck: phase 100 cancels the even harmonics — the hollow, clarinet-adjacent voicing of a string plucked exactly at its middle. On the bell plate tuning it turns purely ceremonial.

Watch the sum: five ringing combs stack like five strings. Ride gain down as res goes up, and tap.limi~ on the output is cheap insurance for the res 100 lifestyle.

The gesture

The bank's real instrument is the morph engine. Store the major glow in slot 1 and the dark cluster in slot 2 — then recall 2 8000 and every frequency, ring time, and damping glides for eight seconds through tunings you never chose, Hermite interpolation keeping the sweep continuous instead of zippered. The chapter's advice stands: automate nothing else. One long morph over a static source is a complete piece of sound design; grabbing a single fader mid-morph overrides just that parameter, which is the escape hatch when the in-between territory finds something worth keeping.

When to leave the recipe

• One resonance, surgically placed: tap.comb~ is the single unit, or tap.svf~ @type bell when you want EQ, not a string.
• You want echoes. Combs long enough to hear as repeats are delays wearing a costume — tap.delay~/tap.multitap~ are the honest tools.
• You want more than five strings. The count is fixed; mc. wrapping the whole bank gives you choirs of banks, at which point you are building a sympathetic-string instrument and should budget CPU like it.