As I was thinking of the pros and cons of knobs vs sliders, I had an idea:
traffic light envelopes Attack is green, like Go! Decay is yellow, and Release is red, like Stop! There are three horizontal sliders on a single time line, see image. The new thing about it is that the sliders show the progress more visually without using graphical envelopes (which I hate). One can also visually compare the timings of different envelopes, for instance when making brass pads, which require slightly different attacks for filter and amp.
So, when you grab and move any slider, the timings to the right of it remain the same, i.e. the sliders to the right of it retain their distances/timings. What changes, though, is the timing to the left of it.
For instance, if you drag the yellow slider of the amp envelope on the image towards the left, i.e. shorten the decay, attack and release timings stay the same.
Naturally, the yellow slider head can never be to the left of the green one, and the red one never to the left of the yellow one.
Each slider head marks the zero point for the next slider head.
Aux 1 for instance shows maximum attack, and zero delay and release.
Being a level, the sustain is separate.
You can click and drag, or mouse-over and scroll the slider heads directly or anywhere along the time line, either more or less directly on the groove for the decay, or above or below for the release and attack respectively.
The vertical green, yellow and red lines mark the max position for the respective sliders. The red line basically marks the overall time an envelope can take when all sliders are set to max and without sustain, in the image 1.5 mins (30 secs per phase).
What do you think?
Envelope idea
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- KVRian
- 626 posts since 30 Aug, 2012
It's clever but I would find it confusing. Controls like ADSR are well established and understood. There is no right and wrong here but I would tend to stick with a more standard layout. Put your thinking energy into the audio processing behind the GUI.