While it’s standard envelope behavior to be a positive voltage, there are additional possibilities in sound design when you can send a negative voltage from an envelope. For example, if you have a sound being processed with a band or high-pass filter and you want the envelope to reduce the frequency of the filter before returning to it’s default value.
As a fun bonus, this would likely mean that you could invert the shape of the LFOs as well.
For elaboration: if modulation with a positive amount featuring a Square Wave starts the waveform as High, then modulation with a negative amount would start the waveform as Low.
What is the problem?
The modulation options only feature positive amounts.
What do you want to achieve?
I’d like to be able to set negative amount values from modulation sources.
Are there any workarounds?
Not that I am aware of.
Any links to related discussions?
Not that I am aware of.
Any references to other products?
Within the Polyend ecosystem? Not that I am aware of. But I do believe this is a common practice in modular and in many hardware boxes (I have a feeling this is possible with the Elektron Octatrack, for instance).
Unfortunately that isn’t quite the same. Most of this suggestion really centered around the benefit of having negative amounts for Envelopes. Using the example of the Filter Cutoff Envelope - right now the Envelope can only be applied additive, not subtractive from the Frequency of the Filter on the Instrument.
I only mention the possibility of additional functionality discovered by way of applying this to the LFO as a fringe benefit, but even that wouldn’t be the same as applying and offset to an LFO.
I was assuming that using a negative amount for the LFO modulation would invert the LFO shape, basically. For example, if modulation with a positive amount featuring a Square Wave starts the waveform as High, then modulation with a negative amount would start the waveform as Low.
inverted/negative modulation are almost standard in synthesis these days and in the past. the Tracker has my favorite workflow of any hardware device but the lack of essential synthesis features makes it very hard to create many styles of synth patches/sounds.
For those looking for an example of inverted modulation look no further than your bread and butter Jungle/DnB bass sound_ the one that swells in with a sort of sucking/ faux-reverse sounding attack. Super cool and impossible to recreate as it stands.
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