Envelope Followers - what do folks like?

Wondering what Envelope Followers (not Envelope Shaper) folks on the forum like & why.

Apologies for this Raino butā€¦Nosey Postmenā€¦ groans accepted

Best Regards, Dave

Iā€™m curious to know what you want to use the follower for? I use them in my modular (hardware followers). Fabfilter has some that are connected with their filters. Most of the duties that I use an envelope follower for can usually be handled with velocity tracking (synths). In a lot of ways I suppose Waves vocal rider and even some gates are essentially envelope followers. Ableton actually has a nice one built in.

Iā€™m always interested in hearing what purposes people use things like followers for!

I want to use it to have an audio wash ā€˜followā€™ another audio source (typically electric guitar or voice). A gate with a side-chain is close, but itā€™s basically just on/off with some control over the transition between the two. I want to be able to follow the ups & downs of the control audio in the treated audio.

Envelope followers have been typically used as an ā€œAuto Wahā€, such as the Mutron III Envelope follower.
The way they work is that they can control the cutoff of a filter based on the amplitude of the input signal.

So if the input signal is low, the device will only sweep through part of the range of the cutoff filter, and if the input is louderā€¦ it will sweep through more of the range.

One very famous song that uses this effect is the intro Clavinet sound on Stevie Wonders ā€œHigher Groundā€.
Bad as hell! :mrgreen:

Check out the Mutron III ā€œHEREā€

@Rainoā€¦ Since you have Komplete 9 Ultimate, you must also have Guitar Rig 5ā€¦

There are several variants of these plugin modules located in the ā€œFiltersā€ section under the ā€œComponentsā€ tab


Al

I have always wondered why there isnā€™t a built in envelope follower that simply writes automation.
Some max. and min. value and a invert option.
Could be extremely useful for controlling all sorts of automation.
Autowah, vocal rider etc. and easy to move automation to be in front of the actual audio to get some interesting effects.

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Not really looking to filter anything, just control the gain level of signal A based on how loud signal B is.

Iā€™m sorryā€¦ I totally misread what you were looking to use the envelope follower forā€¦ My bad!

Since you are just looking to control level, why not just use the side chain into a compressor controlling signal A? You could use any audio signal for the side chain including signal A.

I get how you can use a compressor in the manner you describe to duck the the main signal when another signal is coming in through the side chain. But what I want to do is almost the inverse of that. When the the sidechain is at -infinity then the main signal out should be -infinity, and when the sidechain is at 0dB the output should be at 0dB. Superficially this sounds like how a Gate behaves, but basically a gate is on or off - and I want it to track everything between on and off.

Anyway I donā€™t see how to config a compressor to achieve this result.