Karplus-Strong Plucked Instrument

[Tanuj Tiku]

I made a Karplus-Strong web-based plucked instrument with the help of Claude AI. Some of you might find it offensive but I have been spending some time with Claude for the past year and it has become freakishly powerful and in some ways, very useful. So, this basically works in your browser.

Claude made the whole thing but with guidance along the way. I first tried to make a physical modeling based violin which it coded based on publicly available models. I ran the code in Faust IDE on the web and then tried to bring it into Projucer and eventually in visual studio - it was too complicated for me because I have no coding background at all. I did a flute too and it was sort of OK-ish. Both the things worked in Faust but sounded quite bad. I was stuck for a few days trying to make a VST and it kept crashing cubase and reaper. Pretty much outside my depth.

Anyway, a friend of mine had some success building synths and a nice environment in HTML. So, he suggested I try that. After some iterations, guidance and buildings modules plus controls I wanted we eventually arrived at this.

It has various controls for the instrument itself plus the usual suspects. The reverb fades in with the sustain pedal or it can left on. The delay is pretty basic at this time. I have some ideas to add more plugins if you will that add harmonies with probability play and perhaps some kind of global chaos/warp function but in this sort of instrument - may be something more beautiful. I could assign many controls to the modwheel and get something going.

This turned out to be surprisingly good and very playable.

It is a new world!