Reference Manual

396 Live Instrument Reference

Resonators in 1 + 2 (Parallel) Conﬁguration.

The Voices chooser sets the available polyphony. Since each voice that’s used requires ad-

ditional CPU, you may need to experiment with this chooser to ﬁnd a good balance between

playability and performance, particularly on older machines.

With Retrig. enabled, notes which are already sounding will be immediately stopped when re-

triggered, rather than generating an additional voice. This can be useful for keeping CPU down

when working with long decay times.

24.2.6 Sound Design Tips

Although Collision has been designed to model the behavior of objects that exist in the physical

world, it is important to remember that these models allow for much more ﬂexibility than their

physical counterparts. While Collision can produce extremely realistic simulations of conven-

tional mallet instruments such as marimbas, vibraphones and glockenspiels, it is also very easy

to “misuse“ the instrument’s parameters to produce sounds which could never be made by an

acoustic instrument.

To program realistic instrument simulations, it helps to think about the chain of events that pro-

duces a sound on a mallet instrument (a marimba, for example), and then visualize those events

as sections within Collision:

•a beater (Mallet) strikes a tuned bar (Resonator 1).

•the tuned bar’s resonance is ampliﬁed by means of a resonating tube (Resonator 2).

Thus the conventional model consists of the Mallet excitator and the two resonators in a serial (1

> 2) conﬁguration.

Mallet

Noise

Resonator 2

Resonator 1