How do I recreate this sound (in Ableton)?

Question

I've been trying to recreate this sound from a song I made when I was quite young. I used GarageBand for this, not Ableton, but due to the advanced level of Ableton I thought I'd still be able to recreate it. From what I remember, I took some sort of string/bell-type synth and played around with all the settings till I came to this.

I will say, however, despite my initial suspicion of a (pluck) string or bell base sound, I haven't made any success with either. The farthest I've gotten was with the muffle, but clearly there's more to this sound than a muffle.

Answer 1

Both sound like a sine wave with different ADSR processing:

• A: attack
• D: delay (sometimes not provided)
• S: sustain
• R: release

Think of ADSR as someone turning up the volume of this instrument quickly at the beginning (A), lowering it a bit (D), keeping it for a while (S) and finally lowering it again (R) . Depending on their values you'll get e.g. the soft bell-like sound in the beginning, or the one with the longer sustain.

On a synthesizer plug-in this may be an option you can use. See, if GB provides a synthesizer as an instrument. If yes, use two and adjust their ADSR individually. If not: ... well ...

Note, that the synthesizer instrument will generate a long lasting tone for a given note, where its volume (envelope) is modulated as I described.