2009

Nevertheless, this programming tour of the ES2 is included as a part of the toolbox to
help you learn the ES2’s architecture through experimentation. You’ll find that this
approach is fun. You’ll also discover, as you work through a number of simple operations,
that results come quickly when you start to create your personal sound library.
As you become more familiar with the ES2 and its myriad functions and parameters, you
can create your own templates to use as starting points for designing new sounds.
Using the ES2 Slapped StratENV Setting
The target of this setting is the sound of a Stratocaster, with the switch between bridge
and middle pickup in the middle position—in phase. It attempts to emulate the noisy
twang typical of this sound’s characteristics.
This might be a useful template for emulations of fretted instruments, harpsichords,
clavinets, and so on.
Take a look at its architecture:
Osc 1 and Osc 3 provide the basic wave combination within the Digiwave field. Changing
the Digiwaves of both in combination delivers a huge number of basic variations—some
also work pretty well for electric piano-type keyboard sounds.
Osc 2 adds harmonics with its synced waveform, so you should only vary its pitch or sync
waveform. There are a couple of values that can be changed here, which will give you a
much stronger, more balanced signal.
An old trick, which delivers a punchy attack, was used—to create an effect that the use
of a naked wave wouldn’t deliver, even with the best and fastest filters available: You
use an envelope (in this case, Env 1) for a quick “push” of a wavetable’s window—or all
wavetables together, where it makes sense.
Set up Envelope 1’s decay time for this short push by moving the wave selectors for all
oscillators. (Although it makes no sense to do this on the synced sawtooth oscillator,
Osc 2, use the envelope trick regardless.)
This allows you to vary the punchiness of the content between:
• Envelope 1’s contribution to the overall attack noise and changing decay length—a
short decay results in a peak, a long decay results in a growl, as Envelope 1 reads a
couple of waves from the wavetable.
• Modulation destination—you can always assign this to each of the oscillators separately.
• Start point—you vary the wave window start with minimum and maximum control of
EG1/Osc.waves modulation: negative values for a start wave before the selected wave,
positive values for a start wave from a position behind the selected wave that rolls the
table back.
124 Chapter 5 ES2