Creative ways to use envelope

hello guys,

if u could share creative ways that u use envelopes besides the normal use

i use it to modulate the filter frequency

stay creative :slight_smile:

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I sometimes use Bog Audio’s adsr, with the inverted output connected to a vca to mimic sidechain compression, commonly when sidechaining to the kick, as I find it can give different control to the norm.

I also use envelopes for gating a sustained sound, to give it rhythm using a trigger sequence.

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When I’m trying to get guitarish textures I use envelope to momentarily, slightly, increase the pitch to simulate the effect of plucking (like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KjOwVRFvYA).

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If you run a VCO into it, you can use it as a whacky waveshaper. There is also a way to do that with a sequencer if you are interested.

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Creating kick drums with two or three envelopes and a sine wave. One for main pitch drop envelope. One for amplitude envelope, and potentially a second pitch envelope - extremely short - just for the click/transient.

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LOL, when I used 9 guage strings the pitch would shoot up on the attack. Now that I use 11’s it hardly moves :wink:

Some great sounds in there

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That’s true but it always goes up a little bit. The “crunch” you get from distortion is a combination of things and the slight detuning is one of them.

Hmm, Vernon Reid always used 11s as well.

I think to play light stings and have it sound good and be in tune you need play very well. I don’t play well enough, so light strings and I don’t mix very well - it just took me decades and a guitar teacher to learn this. I know that Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top famously plays 8’s (!!!)

Some say that he goes down as low as 6s though he has also claimed to use strings made from cadillac bumpers.

The guitarist in the meat puppets used to use a peso as a guitar pick because he thought gibbons did.

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Do you know the Seriously Slow envelope generator? Before I saw it I hadn’t even considered envelopes this long and slow. Even if you stay in the realms of minutes/hours, it can make you think of a completely different set of uses.

I found this trick very useful also!

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Missed this when you first posted it. I do the same but with an envelope follower.

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