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Env Follower
10 HP. Rectifies and smooths each side separately, with independent attack and release times.
This is the only module in the set that is not an effect, and it is here for a practical reason. The other four are far more interesting driven by the audio passing through them than by a free-running LFO, and without a follower you would need a module from another plugin to do the most obvious thing the set suggests. An envelope out of this into the Rate or Depth CV of the Flanger is the patch the whole series was designed around.
| Control | Range | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Attack | 0.1 ms to 1 s | 5 ms |
| Release | 1 ms to 5 s | 150 ms |
| Gain | 0 to 4x | 1x |
| Port | Direction |
|---|---|
| Attack, Release, Gain | CV in, one per knob, each with an attenuverter |
| IN L, IN R | audio in. R is normalled to L |
| ENV L, ENV R | envelope out, 0 to 10 V |
| GATE L, GATE R | gate out |
ENV reaches full scale on a 10 Vpp input at unity gain.
GATE goes high above 1 V and low again below 0.5 V. The two thresholds are deliberately different. A single threshold makes a signal sitting near the boundary chatter, producing a stream of very short gates that is useless for triggering anything.
A follower with one time constant is only ever right for one kind of material.
Fast attack with slow release tracks percussion, catching each hit and then decaying smoothly instead of following every fluctuation in the tail. Both slow gives you an overall level, which is what you want for driving a filter sweep across a whole phrase. Both fast follows the waveform closely enough to produce ripple on low frequency content, which is usually a problem rather than a feature.
There is no single setting that does all three, which is why there are two knobs.
They are not summed. A stereo source gives you two different envelopes, which matters if you are using them to drive the two sides of something else.
Patch only IN L and the normalling means both sides track the same thing, so you get identical envelopes without doing anything special.
Every other module in the set passes its input through when bypassed. This one leaves its outputs at zero.
The reason is that its outputs are measurements rather than treated copies of the input. There is nothing sensible to pass through. Routing IN to ENV on bypass would send a full-range bipolar audio signal into somewhere a unipolar control voltage was expected, which at best does nothing useful and at worst does something loud downstream.
There is no control over the rectifier shape and no lookahead, so a sharp transient will always be caught slightly late no matter how fast the attack is set. For driving modulation this does not matter. For anything where sample accurate timing matters, use a dedicated trigger source instead.
At very fast attack and release settings on low frequency material the envelope will follow individual cycles of the waveform rather than the overall level. Slow the release down until the ripple disappears.
Modules
Reference