Chisel - Max for Live Transient Shaper and ADSR Envelope Designer

High-Precision Transient Shaper & ADSR Envelope Designer

BETA RELEASE

Sculpt, isolate and re-shape the attack, sustain and release of any audio signal — drums, synths, guitars or vocals — with precise control. Chisel offers phase-by-phase envelope shaping and sidechain input in a low‑CPU Max for Live device, optimized with Gen~ and RNBO for sample‑accurate processing and high performance.

Changelog

• Chisel 0.4.0, 12-2025: fix incorrect slope calculation for attack, decay and release curves.

Main features

• Hear and process each envelope phase independently — Attack (Attack + Hold + Decay), Sustain, Release — with per‑phase Solo buttons. Isolate a snare’s initial hit, sculpt the body of a pad, or tighten the tail of a vocal.
• Per‑phase Gain, Length and Curvature controls let you precisely shape dynamics and timing. The Attack section includes a Speed control: when Speed > 0% a Hold stage is inserted before Decay, and the time (ms) shown beneath Speed indicates how long it takes to reach the Attack gain.
• Sidechain input with its own filter and drive — use an external trigger to duck or re‑shape audio dynamically.
• Envelope filter section with Solo, filter and drive.
• Both filters include Type (Lowpass/Highpass/Bandpass), Cutoff/Center frequency and Q controls.
• Sensitivity slider to tune how the detector responds.
• Attack energy meter for visualizing transient strength, plus a Threshold slider to set the detection level.
• Hard, Soft and No Clip modes.
• Mix control to blend processed and dry signals.
• Lookahead (1.5 / 3 / 6 ms)
• Delta mode monitors only the processing added by the device (Wet minus Dry).
• Input and Output meters and sliders for gain staging.
• Documentation is available in Ableton's Info View for each parameter.

Examples

Increasing attack gain and removing release on a simple breakbeat loop:

Before

After

Sidechaining a continuous synth pad to a drum loop so the pad is briefly unmuted (gated) on each drum hit:

The only device used in each example is Chisel; no other processing was added.

The device is free; please note it may still contain minor bugs. For support, reach out to [email protected]. Enjoy!