Rules of thumb for effective instrument design

• Try to make everything dynamically evolve. It will not cost you any more computationally but will sound more interesting.
• Always damp parts of an instrument so that its spectral profile will change as the sound decays away. Instruments with uniform damping often sound the most clinical and synthetic.
• Generate lots of output file from each performance. Whether or not you generate any output, Tao will still have to churn its way through the intensive calculations needed to realise a performance. It will not cost you any more to see how ten different points on an instrument sound, rather than just one.
• Use lots of Connector devices. The more highly coupled an instrument is the more complex the resulting vibrations will be. Once again using lots of Connectors will not make the performance significantly more computationally expensive than using none, but it will make the resulting sounds more interesting.
• Experiment with small parts of a large instrument in isolation before coupling them together. If one of your strings goes "clunk" instead or ringing beautifully when you pluck it, there is not much sense in connecting 100 such strings to a resonator and coming back later only to find that the whole instrument goes "clunk"!