I’m having a hard time understanding how the Amp enveloppe works in AR.
I’m familiar with ADSR env on any synth : all I want to do is play bass note with a BD engine with the equivalent of 0 att 0 dec 100 sustain 0 release.
So basically just having full sound at pressure of midi key and instant cut at release of the key.
This seems impossible to do! Putting the decay at 0 and hold at 127 on the synth engine does not work like it “should” since it only takes the decay time information no matter the note lenght.
Turning up the decay implies having a release time after note is released which is not what I want.
Tried any type of combination with the amp enveloppe did not change a thing.
This seems like a basic feature so maybe i’m missing something?
one on the “oscillator”/“machine”, on the [SRC] parameter page
one at the VCA, on the [AMP] page
anything encoded in a sample
To get a sustained tone, you need to open up all the envelopes. A bit of digging just now showed me that none of the BD machines can have their DEC property set to INF. As you suggest, they only go to 127, which eventually decays. The DUAL VCO machine can have DEC set to INF.
If you want a 100% sustained tone, use the DVCO machine. The >70 different oscillator arrangements on the DUAL VCO can probably get you close to where you were trying to get with whichever BD machine you were using.
EDIT: just remembered… hold/decay (on the [AMP] page) needs to be “off/auto”. It’s below 0, rather than above 127.
Thanks for the tip.
To be clear I don’t want infinite decay as in drone type sound. Just infinite sustain so entirely linked to note lenght / midi key pressure.
I just checked I can effectively do it in dual vco mode easily.
Which seems not possible in BD classic engine :I
Yes I could get close in VCO but since I use the sweep time and length parameter to shape the sound, which could be done probably with env lfo but a bit of a hassle when I already have the sound I like ready.
Thanks but decay set to 127 means it does not respond to the note length it just goes in infinite decay / release / drone mode so not what I’m looking for.
Yes I guess it’s a design thing, but I wanted to make sure since I for instance have a Pulsar-23 with bd engine that can sustain infinitely.
As far as I know, even DEC=127/INF (on the [SRC] page) will be cut off if you set the [AMP] envelope up so that it cuts off.
You want a sustained tone as long as the gate is open, right? So you need to ensure that the oscillator/machine feeds the amp with a sustained tone. The only way to do that is to have DEC=INF set on the [SRC] page. This makes the machine behave like an oscillator in a mono synth.
If you set DEC=anything_less_than_inf on the [SRC] page, then eventually (often very quickly) the machine will stop feeding sound to the VCA, regardless how you set up the envelope on the [AMP] page.
The envelope on the [AMP] page is the one that’s gated by the keyboard/MIDI/note length.
The envelope on the [AMP] page is very similar to other ADSRs. It has the quirk of being able to turn D into H (hold). It’s controlled by gate/keys/pads/len as expected.
The odd thing is that the oscillators/machines also have their own internal Decay, separate from the amp envelope. If you imagine a sample might have its own built-in envelope that you can’t change, because it’s in the data… then the DEC values on the [SRC] page are a bit like that.
