I have created an adsr to further my control over my piece, however it does not seem to work. all that I did was go to the browser and find the adsr patch (3.audio.examples/D02adsr.pd), I copied and pasted that patch into my patch then added faders and plugged them into the inlets assuming that they went in the order: peak, attack, decay, sustain, release. However when I trigger the envelpoe, nothing happens, it also doesn't show the envelope in the graph. I have a fader for the main level of the adsr as well.

The main outlet for the adsr is plugged into the last [*~] before the [dac]

any suggestions on how I can make it work?

Thank you

Well it's difficult to answer, maybe if post your patch.

some basics about adsr :
ADSR will control amplitude of your sound it needs to be connected to the right inlet of a *~ object and triggered each time you want sound. the left inlet will take the outlet of your dsp part.

you can try the attached adsr which uses pack before sending values to the line object

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/adsr-erbe.pd