To simplify things, I opted to start for some qualitative comparisons between the KEX hardware and the plugin version. A lot is possible – sadly with the exception of having a divided release stage. Finally, by setting the “level 0” to nonzero values, you can use that as a super-snappy first part of the attack portion. And as the attack portion has a level (as has the decay portion), you can also have a two-part attack and one-part decay. As the sustain portion also has a time, you can think of it as a second decay stage. However, this eight-parameter-setup allows for some tricky things impossible with the usual envelopes. where it will reside until the key is released? As usual, the first stage is triggered by gate on, and stage 3 is the sustain stage, i.e. Level, in this case, is level at that stage’s start (although Korg has named the parameters differently by having levels for segments 0-3 and times for segments 1-4). While the envelopes look at first sight like normal four-stage envelopes, the tricky part is that every stage has parameters for time and level.

Like many of its contemporaries, the Wavestation has more than just the usual four-parameter four-stage ADSRs. And one area where improvements were made were the envelopes.

The Wavestation (or in our case, both the Wavestation KEX and the Legacy Edition plugin version) are true to what I’d like to call the second generation of digital synths.Īt this point, Moore’s Law had started to give synth designers so much computing power that they started to think outside of the box of 70s analogue synth design. Note that I won’t repeat all the details about the test case definition from the last post – so better read them up there. Now, I’m finally going to follow up on that promise. I promised you a case study on the Korg Wavestation’s envelopes.

Wavestation plugin