Digital hardware synths like the Roland JV/XV/Fantom and the Yamaha Motif/Montage usually don’t display the exact time between envelopes, and instead use a parameter ranging from 0 to 127.
In the Roland synths, the time difference between 0 and 127 is an exponential curve. For example 127 Decay is about 30 seconds, but 64 Decay is only a little over 1.5 seconds. The Steinberg macro pages also seem to do it this way.
So this got me thinking. What if the envelope display in Halion’s Zone tab could optionally follow an exponential time curve?
Instead of showing something like 0.50s, 1.00s, 1.50s, 2.00s… like it is today, it’s something more useful like 0.10s, 0.30s, 1.00s, 3.00s, 10,00s, 30,00s…
Not only this is more intuitive, this also reduces how often you have to zoom to set common envelope times.
When designing sounds, we usually don’t think in seconds, we think in “coarser” terms like very short attack, short decay, long decay, very long release… Adjustments in the milliseconds range is very rare outside of very short envelope times. For example, there’s a big difference between a 0.00s release and a 0.20s release, but something like a 1.00s release doesn’t sound very different from a 1.20s release. I think that makes sense.