This letter proposes a method to control the decay time of specific partials in the context of waveguide modeling and string instrument synthesis. This is achieved by adding a second-order resonator for each partial to be controlled in the feedback loop of a waveguide string model with a loss filter. The filter design method gives an efficient and parametric way to obtain partial-specific decay-time control. The introduced method is useful for string instrument synthesis. The proposed method is verified through a synthesis example of a recorded acoustic guitar tone and is applicable for other string instruments such as the piano.

IEEE Signal Proc. Letters

Recorded Sound
• Recorded guitar pluck: String: 6 - Fret:5

Synthesized examples
• Initial synthesis: String: 6 - Fret:5
• PDTC processed synthesis (3 harmonics): String: 6 - Fret:5
• PDTC processed synthesis (15 harmonics): String: 6 - Fret:5