Then you have to discover which envelope of which element is controlling the attack. Sometimes its the amp envelope and sometimes its the filter envelope.
First let me ask, are you familiar with how an envelope is used to control the attack and decay of a synth sound? If not, there's a discussion in the manual.
Open the pad, Affected.
Note it has one and only element, which makes it easy.
This pad has a slightly elongated attack, and if you look at the amp envelope, you see the peak is around .5 sec.
However, the filter envelope has much greater influence on the attack. To prove this to yourself, reach up and turn off the filter -- just set it to Off, and listen to the sound. Do you hear how it now follows more closely to the amp envelope?
When you open the Filter envelope, notice how the sound designer implemented this filter envelope -- see that the first peak is around 2215 ms?
Return the filter to LP2, and drag that first envelope point back towards 400ms. Test the sound -- is that more responsive?
If not, then move it again to 200ms, and next, click the Amp tab and change the first peak there back to 200ms.
Play another note -- is this more of what you want?
When you have what you want, save your new Program to a separate folder -- maybe one called My Pads or something creative like that. Saving to a different file, you can always start fresh with the original programs.
One more thing before I leave you to your new career as a sound designer (to rake in the big bucks!) Learn to use the MIDI matrix -- more advanced sounds use the MIDI matrix for a surprising number of effects (even more so if you happen to own Rapture, also.) So if you can't figure out why a sound is behaving in a particular manner, and you've checked and rechecked all envelope parameters, don't forget the MIDI matrix. The programmer just may be doing something in there.
OK, one more thing after the one more thing -- One last place to hide effects is right in the SFZ files, themselves. SFZ files are nothing more than text files -- you can read them in any text editing program like notepad. They have a structure defined in the following file:
SFZ Specification.
A designer can even embed commands in an SFZ file to manipulate both the amp and filter envelope of a sound. This kind of trick is not a common occurrence, and I don't really recommend you work this way, since DimPro and Rapture have far better tools for manipulating an envelope. The Dimension Pro and Rapture the designers have in general placed special SFZ files like these in folders named to indicate their uniqueness, ie, folder names like "Effects" and "Twisted Sfz". I don't recommending that you jump right into editing the SFZ files, in fact I caution you to stay out of SFZ files, that is if you value your free time. Just be aware that the SFZ file you happen to be working with may itself be the source of a particularly squirrely sound design problem that isn't revealed by careful examination of the program parameters -- and even then, assume you missed something! Envelopes in SFZ are rare, primarily because they're hard to get working. (For instance, see this thread:
sfz definition filter eg ).