the glossary
the words producers use, each one demonstrated rather than defined. pick a term and a test note runs through the real effect — frequency across, time receding into the distance, loudness as height. every word turns out to have a shape.
low notes on the left, high on the right; the front edge is now and it recedes into the past. drag to turn it.
attack
how fast a sound arrives
the time from silence to full volume. a plucked string is there almost instantly; a bowed one swells in. attack is most of why you can tell a piano from an organ playing the same note — cut the first fifty milliseconds off a piano recording and people stop recognising the instrument.
what to look for: watch the front edge of the ridge: sharp and vertical when the attack is short, sloped when it's long.
the note repeats every couple of seconds so you can move the slider and hear the difference between one hit and the next. everything else in the chain is bypassed — you're only ever hearing the one word.
why these all look like the same picture
because they are. every one of these effects is doing something to a signal in time or in frequency, and the waterfall shows both axes at once — so delay separates along time, filtering carves along frequency, distortion adds along frequency, and compression squashes the height. once you can see the two axes, most production vocabulary stops being jargon and turns into geometry.