Pluck

A plucked-string-style triggered envelope whose natural decay switches to a separate release rate when the gate closes.

What it does #

Pluck creates a fast excitation followed by an exponential-like falloff instead of a flat Sustain stage. Decay controls the tail while the gate remains high, Release takes over after gate-off, and the internal amplifier applies that contour directly to audio.

Controls and ports #

Gate In or the note-gate pre-cord starts the excitation. Attack controls the rise and short peak formation, Decay controls damping while the gate is held, Release controls damping after gate-off, and Affect Voice Lifetime can retain a polyphonic voice through the tail. Envelope, amplified audio, and modulation outputs are provided.

Practical uses #

• Shape short strings, mallets, percussion, and other sounds whose energy should decay immediately after excitation.
• Use a long Decay but shorter Release so held notes ring while released notes are damped quickly.
• Send the envelope signal to pitch or brightness while its internal amplifier shapes amplitude.

Things to know #

• Decay is active while the gate is high; Release replaces it as soon as the gate becomes low.
• The envelope does not settle on a sustain plateau, so even a held note naturally loses energy.
• A new rising gate restarts the attack excitation from the current tail state.
• The recovered tail coefficients are exponential and are associated with a -60 dB target (0.001) in the time conversion helper.

Technical details #

A high-confidence Nitro implementation candidate supports the technical summary, but the visible-module mapping remains inferred.

The confirmed envelope/Pluck body detects a rising gate, starts an Attack state that moves linearly toward one, and then lets that excitation fall again. Its envelope state follows state = max(attack_stage, state * falloff), choosing falloff = decay while the gate is high and falloff = release after gate-off. The helper converts a requested time to an exponential damping coefficient with a = exp(log(0.001)/(time*sample_rate)), so the nominal time corresponds to a fall toward -60 dB. The output is linearly interpolated across the Grid processing block; exact visible time preprocessing and the external audio-VCA wrapper still need confirmation.

Nitro port	Type
gateIn	InputAudioPortType
useDeviceGateIn	InputValuePortType
deviceGateIn	InputAudioPortType
attack	InputAudioPortType
decay	InputAudioPortType
release	InputAudioPortType
affectVoiceLifetime	InputValuePortType
out	OutputAudioPortType
outGateScalar	OutputAudioPortType
outScalar	OutputAudioPortType

Open questions #

• Measure the exact Attack shape, peak timing, and retrigger behavior from nonzero tail values.
• Confirm the UI time-to-coefficient conversion, Decay-to-Release switching sample, internal VCA path, and zero-time limits.
• Measure when Affect Voice Lifetime ends relative to the envelope's 0.0001 threshold.

Version and sources #

Checked against Bitwig Studio 6.0.6. This page combines Bitwig's module metadata, the existing Grid course and guides, and Nitro analysis where the mapping is strong enough to support a technical statement.

Related material #

• Grid Modules course reference
• AD Envelope - Signal Generator

Return to Bitwig Grid Modules or the Grid Modules course lesson.