If you’ve been following along so far, you might have realized an important fact about the kick we’ve been building: the duration of the kick is affected by the length of the MIDI note that is triggering it.
It’s not that this is necessarily right or wrong – it’s just important.
Remember, we’re determining the timbre of the kick in large part by adjusting the speed of the pitch envelope. Therefore, if the kick patch is sensitive to the duration of MIDI notes, shorter MIDI notes will cut off before the entire pitch envelope completes, making for a more clipped sound. Give it a try. I’ll wait.
Just like fixed pitch, it’s also possible to fix the length of the envelope so it doesn’t care about note length. Click on oscillator A and take a look at the center display. In the lower left hand corner, you’ll see a control labeled Loop.
This control is labeled such because Operator has looping envelopes. However, we’re interested in the mode called Trigger, which isn’t a loop at all. Trigger mode simply causes the oscillator to ignore note length. The duration of the note can now be determined entirely by adjusting the Decay of oscillator A’s volume envelope.
Spend some time dialing this in. What you may find (particularly if you’ve stuck with the 100hz fixed pitch we set up in the last tip) is that extending the decay doesn’t have much effect. We’ll sort that out in the next tip.
In trigger mode, note length is ignored allowing
For the moment, let’s explore the Release of the volume envelope…
