[muxator]

The way a sound evolves in time contains a lot of timbrical information.

Different harmonics have different ADSR curves (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release).

Above all, one cannot overstress the importance of the attack transient. There are famous experiments in psychoacoustics that show that, when deprived of their attack transient, the sounds of two different instruments may become hard to tell apart.

Personal anecdote: as a classic guitarist, it took me three years of experimentation to find the right way to cut my fingernails in order to have a better sound. The Electronic Engineer in me says that those were three years spent to look for how to improve 0.1 seconds of noise at the start of each of my notes.

[mrob]

>Above all, one cannot overstress the importance of the attack transient.

Roland used this fact to produce surprisingly realistic sounds at low cost. When memory was too expensive to sample the whole note, you could get excellent results from sampling just the transient and using traditional subtractive synthesis for the rest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_arithmetic_synthesis

[schwartzworld]

> when deprived of their attack transient, the sounds of two different instruments may become hard to tell apart

A neat trick is playing guitar through a volume pedal. You mute the sound, pluck a string and then swell in the volume pedal. The rest of the ASDR envelope can be created with other effects like delays.

[CPLX]

The song Cathedral by Van Halen is a particularly brilliant example of this. Except even more remarkable he used the knob on the guitar to do it rather than a pedal:

https://youtu.be/3OqrWUooOJc?si=NJDoNGkSfJu0gM6X