Re: What is a Transient Shaper?
Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 2:56 pm
how anyone mixed multitracked lived drums before transient designers came into the fold, i have no idea. huge respects to that.
macc's clarified the process. in practice, they're really useful on (surprise) transient things-- drums especially, but also short bass sounds, etc. I use them as a sort of halfway tool between a gate and a compressor; they're excellent for shortening a sound and getting rid of a natural reverb tail, w/o it sounding cut off, which not all gates can do. They're also great for slowing down the attack of a sound, making it seem more intense and/or farther away-- or for accentuating the transient, making it seem closer and possibly smaller. works wonders on rimshots, and room mics on a drumkit.
you can accentuate the decay of a sound as well, and create an effect similar to sidechained pumping. often really pretty ugly (most sounds devolve into the noise floor at the end of the decay), but sometimes quite interesting.
also the opposite of compression is expansion... yet another tool that's about halfway between gating and compression.
TBH it's really a mix tool, not so much an effect... in EDM, if you're using it on drums, you'd probably find more joy by just choosing a different sample, but YMMV...
macc's clarified the process. in practice, they're really useful on (surprise) transient things-- drums especially, but also short bass sounds, etc. I use them as a sort of halfway tool between a gate and a compressor; they're excellent for shortening a sound and getting rid of a natural reverb tail, w/o it sounding cut off, which not all gates can do. They're also great for slowing down the attack of a sound, making it seem more intense and/or farther away-- or for accentuating the transient, making it seem closer and possibly smaller. works wonders on rimshots, and room mics on a drumkit.
you can accentuate the decay of a sound as well, and create an effect similar to sidechained pumping. often really pretty ugly (most sounds devolve into the noise floor at the end of the decay), but sometimes quite interesting.
also the opposite of compression is expansion... yet another tool that's about halfway between gating and compression.
TBH it's really a mix tool, not so much an effect... in EDM, if you're using it on drums, you'd probably find more joy by just choosing a different sample, but YMMV...