Beside that you can choose to display secondary spectrum of a desired type (e.g. You may specify Fourier block size in samples, FFT window overlap percentage, spectrum's visual slope. SPAN provides you with a very flexible “mode” system which you can use to setup your spectrum analyzer preferences.
#Install smexoscope professional#
SPAN is a free real-time “fast Fourier transform” audio spectrum analyzer AAX, AudioUnit, and VST plugin for professional sound and music production applications.
Now choose different waveforms and see the waveforms being rendered in s(M)exoscope. In Clearsynth, select only Osc 1 and turn off the filter. Now, if you play notes, you’ll be able to see the nature of the waveform. Set the value of the Time knob to around 0.200. Notice the Time knob on the upper left panel. While this is useful in what we’ll be learning about in subsequent tutorials, for now, we need to decrease the display time to see what we’ve learnt so far.
The default settings shows how the waveform behaves over a larger period of time. Play some notes on your keyboard, and notice the waveform that appears on the screen. Load it as a VST effect, following Clearsynth. The more you use it, the more you don’t have to use it! ? ) Spending time on this will establish a mental connection between sounds and images, and that’s very useful. (Well… I’m no expert yet, and I still use it. This was a tool that helped me a lot when I started learning. This is one of the many useful tools that helps you do that. In my previous post, I wrote about the importance of the ability to visualize sounds. No matter whether you laugh or cringe at the name, it’s a very valuable tool in learning synth programming. s(M)exoscope is a free real time signal analyser plugin that shows a nice graphical display of the signal that is fed to it.
#Install smexoscope install#
This type of envelope is called the ADSR envelope (The letters stand for the names of each phase of the envelope).īefore we begin to learn about the envelopes, I highly recommend you download and install this freeware plugin. Some synths provide more finer controls, but these four controls will most probably be there anyway. Note that this is just one way of controlling volume envelopes. We can control the volume envelope of the sounds that we generate in synths by controlling these four parameters. The part when the key is released, and the volume goes back to zero. The part where a constant volume sustains throughout the duration of the key press. The part where the volume decays down from the maximum to a new volume level. The part where the volume goes up from zero to maximum as soon as you press the key. The parts are the same 4 observations we made above.ġ. In the synthesis world, this is broken down to four parts in order to understand and control it.
As I said before, every sound has such an envelope. It’s the behavior of volume, and its changes over the lifetime of a single note of sound. In all these cases, what you’ve been observing is called the “volume envelope”. Once you release the key, the fade out to zero is also quite slow. But essentially, the average volume is the same. There are lots of changes in volume during the sustain period. You’d want the string sounds to be heard distinctly as you press and hold the key. The sustain part is prominent, as you’d expect. But it doesn’t seem to decay to a lower value. As you can guess from the nature of the sound, this one starts very slowly.