We introduce a reduced parameter synthesis model for the spectral synthesis of musical sounds, which preserves the timbre and the naturalness of the musical sound. It also provides large flexibility for the user and reduces the number of synthesis parameters compared to traditional analysis/re-synthesis methods. The proposed model is almost completely independent from a previous spectral analysis. We present a frequency estimation method using a random walk to keep the naturalness of the sound without using a separate noise model. Three different approaches have been tested to estimate the amplitude values for the synthesis, namely, local optimization, the use of a lowpass filter and polynomial fitting. All of these approaches give good results, especially for the sustain part of the signal. © 2008 IEEE.