This one ended up being really simple:
...but there's a couple tricks to using it in a way that feels violin-y.
First, you have to think about what exactly the violinist is doing at any given moment in order to navigate the notes they're being asked to play. For those who do not know violin performance well: the way a violin produces sound during normal play is by using a tensioned stick with hair coated in rosin attached to it - the aforementioned bow - to scrape along a string, imparting energy to the string that then causes it to vibrate and make sound. And, crucially, the bow is only so long, and can only be moved so slowly across the string ... so, as the violinist plays, they regularly have to stop and change direction.
Plus, the way a violin creates a specific note is not, as with a piano, by pressing a key, but by pressing a finger on a string to hold it against a fingerboard - there are no frets, and to change a note, the violinist has to move their finger to a new position.
So, in my demo of it:
...I use a lot of glides to represent places where a single stroke of the bow is being used to play multiple notes, and at the part at the end of the loop where the notes jump around a bunch, I chop off (sorta) the ends of the notes to give the impression of the gaps between notes from when the violinist had to move quickly.
Oh, and the second trick to it.
This SFX has built into it a point where the violinist runs out of bow and has to do another downstroke. (This is something I copied from the VS Chamber Orchestra sample I referenced when designing the note - it's not included in soundfonts like FluidR3.) If you're holding a note for a long time - 341 ticks, 2.83 seconds - the volume will drop off and there will be a moment like at the start of the SFX where the texture of the note roughens ... because the fictional violinist playing the note ran out of bow and had to do a second stroke. If you don't want that, you can change the loop points to stop before the repeat; if you do want that, you can adjust things to make it happen at the right tempo for your specific piece of music.
me: writes "the aforementioned bow" in a parenthetical
also me: edits out the mention afore that parenthetical
🤦🏽♀️
And yeah, I imagine it's probably straightforward to get from here to viola and cello - might even be the same SFX instrument - but I'd want to do some listening and testing first.
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