Hey, What's up! It's Wick for WickieMedia tutorials.
And today i'm going to talk about the envelope....
The envelope of a sound describes the way that the amplitude varies over time.
Simply put: how the sound get's louder and softer over time.
The envelope of a sound is divided into four sections :
The attack
Decay, Sustain and Release.
This makes up the abbreviation 'ADSR' which we will find on a lot of audio gear,
like on samplers and synthesizers....
The attack is the time that it takes to go from generating the sound until it
reaches its full amplitude.
Most sounds have got a short attack time.
Especially drum sounds and picked sounds.
Some sounds, for example generated by a bow, will have a longer attack-time
like a violin or a cello.
The 'decay' is the time it takes for the level to drop to the sustained level
when the attack time has passed.
The 'sustain' is the level at which the amplitude more or less stabilizes.
Longer sustained sounds like, again a cello,
have a much longer sustain than a short, or a 'transient' sound like a snare drum.
The 'release' is the time it takes to go from the sustained level into silence.
The release is really the tail of the sound.
Let's take a closer look at the envelope of some different sounds and
let's also listen to what they sound like..
Here is the envelope of a snare drum recording.
You can see it's really short so we categorize this as a 'transient' sound.
You can see it has a really short attack-time
This is the envelope of the kick drum,
you can see it's also a transient sound, and it has got a really short attack time
Let's take a look at the envelope of a violin.
I've got two different envelopes here this one is showing a longer tone
and this is obviously a lot shorter.
A guitar can have a really short envelope when it's being played with a pick.
but it can also have a much longer attack when it's being played
with fingers and playing a chord.
Let's take a look at these two envelopes and listen to these...
This is the envelope of a saxophone and it can create a lot more crazy curved
curved
envelopes than this.. but this is a pretty good example. Let's take a listen
at this one...
This is the envelope of a trombone,
let's take a listen at that..
the cool thing with these instruments is really the way that you play them
will have a great influence on the envelope.
let's take a look at this flute envelope right here... and you should
probably be able to recognize this tune.
A piano actually has a sustain-pedal so it can actually increase the sustain
i've got a recording here in which we, at the end, let's go the sustain-pedal
so you can hear the great influence of the pedal...
Note that depending on that sound that you're working with, and the location that
the sound has been recorded at,
the release can contain some of the natural reverb of the acoustics of the
location.
so that's already blended in this tail and its it's not part of the actual
release of the instrument
but it's been added by the room.
Trying a different microphone or a different microphone position,
like close-miking it, can make a big difference on the release-tail
of the sounds that we record.
You will commonly find these names on samplers or on synthesizers
where we can shape the sound. And if you want to shape the sound of something that
we've already got recorded we can use gates and compressors to still shape some
of the envelope of the sound.
so this was explaining the envelope for today
I'm Wick for wickiemedia tutorials, and I hope you have learned something today....
If you want to know more about gates or compressor or equalizers, filters...
you should check out some of the other videos on my channel.
Don't forget to subscribe and I hope to see ya'll soon... Peace!