ADSR on synths? Envelope explained!

 

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we continue our exploration of the synth world talking about the concept of Envelope, also known as ADSR.

ADSR stands for Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release and it is something that we have already seen when talking about compressors, basically it is the way a sound evolves from its beginning to its end, and it is called Envelope.

We are splitting a single sound, for example a snare, a vocal part or in this case a synth note in these 4 moments because each one lets us change radically the result, and it's fundamental when shaping our tone: especially on a synth, changing the ADSR can make the difference between a quick snap that disappear immediately and a super slow and long violin-like note.

Attack: decides the time that it takes for our sound to go from zero to the maximum level, 

Decay: is the time needed from our sound to go back from the maximum level to any set amount we decide.

Sustain: regulates how long the sound keeps playing (at the same level at which the decay ends) as we keep pressing the key on the keyboard, it can be a set amount of time (e.g. 1 second), or indefinite.

Release: decides how long a sound takes to go back to zero, once we release they key on the keyboard.

By choosing the right type of wave and fiddling with the envelope we can give our tone a shape that assigns it (very rudimentally, at this stage) a role, so that we can create music the same way they use to in 70s and 80s videogames, a genre still existent today called "chiptune", in which drums, bass and all the other instruments are created from scratch this way, and this was a very popular way of making music, before the invention of samplers.

Drums were creating by using sounds with very fast attack and decay, very quick release and zero (or almost zero) sustain, and the main difference between the drum parts was in the initial wave and the pitch. 

Same thing for bass, but with different notes and a little more of sustain (the sound doesn't have to be a percussion anymore), and then we could go on creating more high pitch tones with a bit longer sustain and start playing with the effects to create the harmonic content of the song, trying to imitate real instruments or going full synth with leads and pads (pads are synth sounds used for the background harmonies, like orchestral parts, and leads are what we can consider the synth version of a lead guitar part, or a vocal one).

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