6.0

The WavePlayer
214
the VCA. You then hear the WAV-file with a new volume
curve, determined to your taste via the envelope parameter
settings. Fade in the WAV-file automatically in the Attack
time and then fade it out automatically in the Decay time;
the smaller the values for Attack or Decay, the shorter the
fade-times. There is only one exception: if Decay is set to
maximum, there won’t be any fade-out at all and the
WAV-file will sound till it is finished.
Vel in the VCA section stands for Velocity and determines
how dependent the volume of a WAV-file is on the velocity
with which you hit a key. The larger value Vel has, the
harder you have to hit a key to gain the maximum volume.
Soundshaping via VCF and envelope: This section
changes the tone colour of a WAV-file. The section re-
sponsible for tone colour changes in an analogue synthe-
sizer was called VCF, which stands for Voltage Controlled
Filter, so we used this abbreviation here.
The WavePlayer uses lowpass-filters. Broadly speaking,
these filters let the deep parts of a sound passed, but not
the high parts, thus changing the brightness of a sound.
The Frequency (Frq) of such a filter determines the border
between the deep and the high parts of a sound. Techni-
cians call this the cutoff-frequency. To put it briefly, the
lower the Frq value, the duller the sound will be .
With Res (Resonance) you can emphasize the parts of the
sound that are in the immediate neighbourhood of the
cutoff-frequency (or the deep-high border). The higher Res
is, the sharper the overall sound.
As is the case with the VCA, the VCF (more precisely, the
cutoff-frequency) is also controlled via its own envelope.
Env determines the influence of the envelope. The inter-
play between Frq, Atk, Dcy and Env is as follows: press a
key, and the cutoff-frequency starts at the value adjusted
via Frq, rises in the Atk-time to a value equalling the sum
of Frq and Env, and falls back from that to Frq in the Dcy-
time. As in the VCA-envelope, if you set Dcy to maximum,
Dcy will be disabled and the cutoff-frequency will stay on
the sum of Frq and Env for the duration of the sample.
Finally, Vel controls how hard you have to hit the keys in
order to reach the value specified by Env. If you go for
small Vel values, you will reach Env even with soft key
strokes.If you choose large Vel values, you’ll have to hit the
keys quite hard in order to reach the value specified by
Env.