A walker is a fluid entity comprising a bouncing droplet coupled to the waves that it generates at the surface of a vibrated bath. Thanks to this coupling, walkers exhibit a series of wave-particle features formerly thought to be exclusive to the quantum realm. In this paper, we derive a model of the Faraday surface waves generated by an impact upon a vertically vibrated liquid surface. We then particularise this theoretical framework to the case of forcing slightly below the Faraday instability threshold. Among others, this theory yields a rationale for the cosine dependence of the wave amplitude to the phase shift between impact and forcing, as well as the characteristic time scale and length scale of viscous damping. The theory is validated with experiments of bead impact on a vibrated bath. We finally discuss implications of these results for the analogy between walkers and quantum particles.