Manufacturer: Oliver Moebus
FREE
Pianoforte Mini ADSR
is an envelope generator especially designed for processing data from velocity-sensitive keyboards.
Why this module ?
Although keyboards with the ability to produce quiet as well as loud tones were a hot thing on the keyboard market since the rise of the pianofortes in the late 18th century ('pianoforte' is Italian for 'quiet' and 'loud'), it took its time to construct fully electronic versions of such keyboards. At least they weren't available in the sixties, when Dr. Robert Moog designed his first synthesizers. So he had to work with keyboards designed for the electric organ instead and for this reason his classic envelope generation modules have only one level that is controllable: the Sustain, while the peak value of the envelope (and therefore the resulting peak volume level of the sound) is always at maximum - as it is with an organ. As a consequence, integrating different velocity levels with a classic ADSR unfortunately requires resorting to dubious tricks like scaling the envelope or the audio itself, which does not work satisfactorily in all cases - when e.g. re-striking a key with a completely different velocity, an ugly and unnatural jump in the volume will appear unless the envelope curve has returned to 0 volt by itself. Needless to so say that this will not happen when using this module, because it integrates all velocity data seamlessly by modulating the ADSR peak level, as it should be.