Logic's Little-known Enveloper

Maybe it's a hazard of living in a musical age of plenty, but with my plug-in folder stuffed to the gills with all manner of crazy effects, sometimes I forget about some of the cool plug-ins that came built-in to Logic. For whatever reason, it seems that some of the effects get more love than others, but there are probably a few that you would use if you just knew what purpose it serves. Logic's Enveloper is one such plug-in. Transient designers seem to be all the rage these days with tons of companies releasing their own versions, but Logic comes with a pretty cool one right out of the box.

The Enveloper basically allows you to reshape the amplitude envelope of a sound using a simple Attack-Release envelope and gain settings. To use it to add some snap to a synth bass or drum sound, do the following.

1. Set the THRESHOLD to -100. This controls when the effect kicks in, and for the purposes of this demonstration, we want everything to trigger it.

2. Turn your first GAIN (the attack gain) up to around 70-80%. What we're doing here is to increase the volume of the initial attack of the sound, thus giving it a bit more bite.

3. This doesn't sound like much yet, but turn the attack pretty much all the way up, to lengthen the amount of time that initial loudness lasts, and you should hear a significant difference in the attack of your sound.

Play around with different settings and you'll see this plug-in can be useful not only for adding snap to sound, it can also work the opposite way if you use a slower attack. This might come in handy if you, say, had a guitar recording where the pick noise is too loud.

Here is a 'before and after' clip demonstrating the plug-in on a synth bass sound.