Programming cymbal sounds, good synths?

[camsr]

A couple synths I really like for cymbal synthesis are Sytrus and Polyana, they both have decent oversampling and a few tricks required for making "convincing" cymbal tones. What I really dislike is using noise generators for this, they sound inharmonic/aliased.
What are some synths that don't resort to noise for cymbal tones?

[himalaya]

Tremor's Harmonic Oscillator is good for this. Together with FM it can do nice, synthesised cymbals (ride and crash).

[pdxindy]

Zebra

[Michael L]

Chromaphone 2 parameters let you refine the cymbal sounds with a lot if detail.

[No_Use]

For anything metal-sounding I think of FM synthesis first.

edit:
Missed that himalaya already mentioned FM above.

[himalaya]

Using 'just' FM can be very difficult. Anything to do with cymbals ( as well as hi-hats) needs an array of controllable harmonics. A harmonic oscillator, or an additive oscillator/engine really come in handy here. There is an amazing way to make closed hats with a harmonic oscillator. Most people use noise, and I was too for a long time, but someone (thanks Angus!) showed me a way to make hats with a series of harmonics and a HPF. It sounds so good!

Something I like to add to my synthesised cymbals is a chorus effect. It can smear the harmonic content adding a nice 'metallic sheen' to the sound.

Despite the OP not wanting to use noise, I found that some noise is still needed for the transient 'attack' stage of the sound. Although with a complex FM engine noise can be easily obtained from a few operators.

[camsr]

The synths I mentioned do use FM, I have too but I also throw in some RM which helps sometimes. It's really difficult to find the sweetspot between the FM strength and the note played. And it doesn't work all the time either, I feel like it's more of a fluke than anything

This patch is about as close as I've gotten to something "convincing"
And I've done some others with Sytrus that aren't too special but don't sound like a normal cymbal perc.

[jbuonacc]

Chromaphone 2

definitely. probably the best synth for realistic "metallic" sounds on the market. the "Metal" (i think? been a while) oscillator on the Nord G2 was really nice as well. sold Fxpansion 'Tremor' a few years back, but i was pretty impressed with that. wish i still had it, might grab it again some time.

if anyone has any other suggestions for this (metallic sounds) i'd like to hear them.

[camsr]

The soundbank preview video of Chromaphone2 drums and cymbals sounds fairly realistic, I like it, but how programmable is it?

[exmatproton]

ogun (image line)

[himalaya]

This patch is about as close as I've gotten to something "convincing"

Can you post audio? I don't have Polyana on my system.

[resynthesis]

Gordon Reid wrote a bit about cymbals in Synth Secrets. One article is not up at the moment on the SOS site but it's been "scraped"

https://github.com/micjamking/synth-sec ... part-39.md

[CinningBao]

Drumaxx, and check some of xoxos' percussion models http://www.xoxos.net/vst/vst.html#percussion

[Michael L]

The soundbank preview video of Chromaphone2 drums and cymbals sounds fairly realistic, I like it, but how programmable is it?

Its PM so a different way of thinking than FM or Sub, but every little detail can be tweaked and sxulpted. A good explanation in the manual, and 30day demo.

[fluffy_little_something]

Why make such sounds in a synth? I prefer samples for such sounds. They include the initial transient burst that is hard to get from a synth.