Vintage Synth Explorer Forums

I received a minibrute a few days ago and while it's a cool synth I found a strange filter envelope quirk.
It seems the envelope doesn't re-trigger properly when I play legato. It goes like this: the first note sounds as it should sound, but then all the subsequent notes sound brighter at the attack phase. This occurs when a high sustain is set or a bit longer release time. It seems the envelope kind of stays at the sustain level.
Did anyone else owning a minibrute experienced this?

Thank you!

That's completely normal for an analog monosynth...is this your first?

When you play a new note, the EG starts from wherever it happens to be. With long releases, the EG will not have returned to zero yet.

Feature, not bug

try dialing down the release a bit as you play. I find there is often a goldilocks zone where you get the best release character for your playing style, and the right tone as well.

I've had many analogs, though only two with VCO's and analog envelopes, but they didn't exhibit this. It's not a problem when sequencing, but can be annoying when playing. You have to adopt your playing to this.
Well, the quirks of real analogs

The Minimoog acts in the same way, forcing players to learn how to use it. When you play fully legato the envelopes don't retrigger, so you have to lift fingers from the keys to retrigger an envelope. Usually it's a menu choice on modern analogs or VA synths.

I just figured it out. It's the amp decay that does it. No problem, really.
Thank you all

Go into the software control panel and select the legato mode when you want to play legato. You can also use MIDI CC#109 to turn this on and off (0-63 = off, 64-127 = on). It appears the default setting is off...the EGs retrigger on every key press.

This feature is usually called single trigger (EG does not retrigger when playing legato) vs. multiple trigger (every key press retriggers the VC). On some monosynths, only single triggering is possible.

I know. My minibrute is set to multi-trigger. The single triggered envelope behaves differently than what I described above. Don't worry, I know my ABC ; Thanx anyway.

This is totally normal behaviour for analogue envelopes. The envelope is a simple device, when it sees a gate signal it increases the voltage to peak at the rate specified by the attack control, when it hits full it decreases the voltage to the sustain level at the rate set by the decay control, and so on. If the release stage hasn't fully finished yet the envelope doesn't reset to zero, it just starts increasing again, as you've discovered.

I think perhaps the synths you've used in the past that didn't exhibit this behaviour might have been polyphonic? In that case each note is able to decay fully as you play the next one as each voice has its own envelope. But what you describe is totally normal for a mono synth.

NO, in the past I used Studio Electronics ATC-1, Doepfer Dark Energy mk1 and an old Yamaha SY-1. All monophonic.
The thing is that minibrute exhibits this behavior only when the Decay on the amp envelope is set higher than the Decay on the filter envelope. On ATC-1 for example I could set the amp envelope decay and sustain at full and didn't run into this behavior. At least I don't remember. On Dark Energy the amp envelope was a simple gate and that of course didn't do that, and on SY-1 there was a simple envelope, but I don't remember I heard this behavior.
I used to aproach the amp ADSR many times in the same way as if I'd use a gate, like on 1 osc Rolands. But apparently it's not the same thing. You have to be careful about the decay time. That's all. Now I also don't have the weird sudden jumps in cutoff when two keys are pressed at once accidentally and the arpeggiator behaves much better
Now that this is figured out, the minibrute is an excellent machine Yeah!