Modulation: Making The Sound Change; The Envelope Generator - Arturia KORG MS-20 V User Manual

8.2. Modulation: making the sound change

We now have a sound we can change in various ways – we can alter its pitch, its waveform
and harmonics, its overall frequency spectrum, and its loudness. All we have to do is turn all
the knobs at once in just the right way, to create every note we want to play, right?
Fortunately, there are elements built into the synthesizer that we can set up to do all of this
for us automatically, by sending control voltages to each element in the signal path. We call
these changes modulation , and there are a few simple modulators that do most of our work.

8.2.1. The envelope generator

The envelope generator is a control voltage that starts, changes, and then stops, according
to settings for several stages that it passes through.
The most common envelope type is the ADSR:
The Attack is the time that the sound will take to reach its maximum volume once
•
we start the envelope
The Decay is the time that the sound will take to drop from its maximum volume
•
to the Sustain level
The Sustain is the volume level that the sound will reach when a key is held down
•
long enough to get through the Attack and Sustain
The Release is the time that the sound will take to drop back to silence once we
•
stop the envelope.
Interestingly, the MS-20 has two Envelope Generators (EG), and neither of them is a
traditional ADSR!
Arturia - User Manual KORG MS-20 V - The Basics of Subtractive Synthesis
ADSR envelope
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