Envelopes
It’s finally time to talk about envelopes. I’m not exactly an expert in explaining what these are, so watch a video on YouTube which explains what they are and how the affect a sample. Envelopes can be very important in manipulating samples to get them how you want them to sound. The best way is to use worked examples.
I’m going to give you this pre-assembled MIDI of Endless Battle (as a .s file) from FE12 to use with the FE7 Native Instrument Map. Please insert that into an FE7 ROM and play it in Sappy.
This should be what you hear. As you can see, the strings are not quite there. There are several reasons for this; the sample is obviously not identical to FE12’s. But there’s more. The strings don’t quite reverberate, and they’re no staccato-y enough. You can fix a lot of this problem with - you guessed it - envelopes.
First of all, we’re going to make the strings sound more reverberant by increasing the Release value. This will increase the time it takes for the note to fade off, so to speak. Head to Edit Voice Table, go to instrument 40, and change the Rel to 204. You can change this to any value between 0-255, but I prefer around 204-224. Any more than that is excessive for most instruments and will generate a lot of noise (hissing sound) when played in-game, which isn’t pleasant.
Hit Update, and then OK. Play it. You should have this.
Sounding better, right? We’re not quite there yet, though. I want my strings to not ring out so much. They need to fade off from the moment they strike. This is where I change the Decay value. Decay is the speed at which the note starts to quieten from the moment it is played, rather than at the end. Once again you can change this to any value between 0-255, but I’m going to try it at around 236. I’m also going to completely get rid of Sustain, which will make it so that the note doesn’t keep “holding on” in a loop after it plays, and will instead continuously fade off.
Now I have this.
That’s better.
So you see, I didn’t actually insert any new samples at all, but still managed to get an existing sample to sound similar to how the original might sound. I could even decrease the Attack, to give it a bit of a softer start.
Or, I could swap out the instrument for another one, to get a different sound, but the same envelope:
This is just one way that you can use envelopes to have a more unique sound, whilst still using FE7 samples and retaining the “flavour” of the original songs.