I’m wondering if the attack of sounds can be generally modulated after the fact to an arbitrary audio file and similarly for a piano-pedal sustain type effect.
Can they be gradually and arbitrarily modulated?
I’m a noob, but I think it’s this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envelope_(music)
What DAW are you using?
For staccato, DAW agnostic method is to mess with the envelope ADSR. Make the Attack short, Decay high, Sustain short and Release short.
Another option is to manually edit the sample, cutting it to the length you want it, or just a bit longer and then lowering the Velocity of the sample quickly at the end. This is done slightly differently in every DAW.
Another nother option is to use a gate.Sustain is a little bit trickier. You can again mess with the ADSR until you get the kind of sustained note you’d like. If that’s not quite working, sometimes I find that using delay and reverb together can give a close approximate to a sustain pedal on a piano.
Yes, but only to some degree and very dependent on the source sound. A volume envelope can be applied to any sound. Some DAWs have ways of adjusting the transients by time stretching. Sustain can be tricky to do.
Is there anything specific you want to do?
If I understand the question rightly, the only way I know how to effect audio (as opposed to MIDI) in such a way is to use a dynamics processor of some sort. I’d first reach for a transient shaper, which listens to the volume envelope of an audio signal, and these typically have a knob for attack and sustain. For a more staccato sound, I’d lower the sustain, and vice-versa. Alternatively or in addition to the former processor, I might use a gate if I wanted more silence between notes, and I might use its opposite, a compressor, to bring up lower-level sustain. None of these processes will to change a performance, however.
