I’m pleased to announce the release of Sapphire Env for VCV Rack.
Env is an envelope follower and pitch detector based loosely on the ones inside Surge XT TreeMonster. Env uses a similar algorithm to TreeMonster for detecting pitch: both count samples between zero-crossings of the input waveform. Both use a prefilter to help focus on the fundamental frequency of the input audio.
However, Env uses a different prefilter than TreeMonster. Env uses the same Cytomic filter as used by the Sapphire modules Sauce and Gravy. Env has a wider range of speed ranges than TreeMonster for adjusting how quickly changes in pitch are tracked.
Env has the same ENV (amplitude) and V/OCT (pitch) outputs as TreeMonster, but Env also includes a GATE output that can be toggled between active-high and active-low modes, to indicate whether a pitch is being detected.
Here is a demo video where I use Env to estimate the pitch of a “plucked” Elastika, which is then mimicked by a Venom VCO Unit voice.
Here is another video where I use a pre-release version of Env to follow the pitch of a Tube Unit:
I hope Env will be useful for people to use a microphone to feed voices or real musical instruments into VCV Rack as a way of controlling the pitch and envelope of a modular synth voice.
I also believe Env will be useful for working with some of my physical simulations such as Elastika or Nucleus that are not traditionally tunable.
Thanks to @baconpaul for the original idea for this project, and for guidance and conversations to help implementation. I’m also grateful to @DaveVenom and @Omri_Cohen for early testing and feedback.
I will be interested to receive feedback about how Env performs, where it can be improved, or any problems you encounter with it.