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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How does a synth work?

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are proceeding with our overview about synths with a new article, in which we will go a little bit more in depth on how they work.

As we have already seen in our first article on the subject, synths start from a wave, which can have different forms (it can be a sine wave, a sawtooth wave, a square wave, a triangle wave and so on), and every form with have a different sound, for example one same note according to the wave type can sound a bit more nasal, a bit smoother, a bit more harsh and so on.

This is the basic building block of a synth sound.

Frequency modulation is the thing that happens when you use one wave to modulate another wave, meaning that for example we can put a slower wave (one that is so slow that is not audible, it doesn't create a note but it works only as a mean to modulate our original wave), which we will call oscillator (in this case a slow frequency one), to modulate our initial sound, which is a note (ore a serie of notes) played using the wave we began with.

What does this interaction do? For example our original sound can obtain an oscillating, pulsating effect, the speed of which depends on the speed we set the oscillator to.

At the beginning of this chain we can link a third oscillator, let's imagine a super slow wave, slow to the point of sounding basically like the following oscillation effect is slowing down; we can add several oscillators, according to how our synth is done, and each one with modify our sound furthermore.

So far we have talked about slow frequency waves, but we can actually modulate our initial sound also with waves fast enough to create a note, for example if our first wave was a sine one we can add a different type, like a square one, and see the result.

The initial wave is also called "carrier", while the oscillator that modifies it is also called "modulator", and the way they interact is set by a control called "ratio" which sets the speed of the modulator, and there are certain proportions between the two that are particularly pleasant to hear, for example a ratio 1:1 (which means the 2 waves have the same speed), or 2:1 (which means that the speed of the modulator is twice as fast as the one of the carrier makes the operators (another name to call all these modules that interact among each other) sound good, while the further we move towards more complex mathematical ratios, the more the sound will get weird 

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What is a sound? And What is FM Synthesis?

 Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are going to talk about something that sounds almost phylosophical, and I won't go too much into detail, but I would just like to try to explain, to give a different point of view on what is a sound and what composes it.

A sound, and specifically in our blog we're talking about sounds that can be used to make music, is a wave that starts from a source and arrives to the human ear.

Let's imagine a note, for example the C in the same octave, played with a guitar or with a piano, or with a trumpet: the note is the same, but the sound is indeed different, right?
This depends from the harmonics of that note, not from the note itself. I will re-use the same pictures I have captured for a previous article to explain it: 

This is a sine wave, only the fundamental note of a sound, without overtones.
It's the purest form a sound can be.

This fundamental note is also called basic harmonic.
If this same sound would be more complex (for example if it would pass through a guitar amplifier), we would see a serie of repetitions of this fundamental note, distributed at regular intervals towards the spectrum (these intervals compose a scale which is called Harmonic scale): we would find out that the fundamental note is the same through all the instruments, and what changes, what makes the aforementioned C distinguishable from a piano to a guitar is the interaction between the repetitions, which are called harmonics.
The harmonics that are after the fundamental one are also called "overtones". 

So we can say that everything we hear in nature is a sum of some fundamental note and its harmonics, and Frequency Modulation Synthesis is the combining, mixing and modulating various sine waves in order to try to get close to sounds existent in nature, or to create completely new ones.
That's how a Synth can recreate (sometimes sounding more realistic, sometimes sounding more "synthetic") for example a violin or a piano.

Today we are launching the new tag, "Synth", and we'll start exploring here and there also this complicated yet fascinating world.

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