Acoustic guitar can be brought out in the mix by increasing the pluck shine, leaving the more muddy body unaffected. Alternatively, a sibilant vocal can be reigned in by reducing only the punch of the higher frequencies. You won't always want to increase the snap of the sound as a whole by removing only the sustain of the low frequencies, you can, for example, take out the kick's boomy tail from a drum loop sample, without removing the airy space of the snare and clap reverb. Though the dual-band functionality of Transient Shaper isn't new-Eiosis's discontinued Transienter offered it back in the day-it's a very welcome addition. Soft Clip definitely offers a more natural response. This is most obvious when A/B'd with SPL Transient Designer, which tends to overload much earlier. It can also keep very short peaks from clicking. It adds a nice crunch to any sound that approaches 0 dB, and there's a Clip LED in the metering to let you know when it's active. Soft Clip rounds off peaks with (usually) pleasant distortion, and as Softube are known for their saturation skills, it's wise to keep this switched on, especially when dealing with loud punch settings and transient-heavy material. This might seem trivial, but it allows for more accurate output level settings, helping you to avoid having to use a compressor post-plug-in to tame peaks-which could end up undoing your transient-shaping.Įlsewhere on the interface is the Clip switch, turning on or off Soft Clip at the output stage. What's a very welcome addition to the Transient Shaper is the change gain metering, which essentially displays how much the overall gain is being affected by your Sustain and Punch settings. With plus-or-minus 20 dB, the result is fairly extreme when the plug-in is pushed to the limit, and it's unlikely you'll ever want to do so unless it's for creative reasons. Before you get into the dual-band aspect, Transient Shaper works well as an envelope tool, allowing you to reduce the reverb of a snare sample, increase the snap of a kick or remove unwanted ringing from a tom, for example. Transient Shaper's USP is a simple dual-band functionality, meaning that Punch and Sustain, its major parameters, can occur across the whole sound, or on high and low frequencies separately.ĭrums are the obvious example when talking about transients. While it can be hard to get excited about what's essentially a utility, Softube's reputation for solidly coded and exquisite sounding plug-ins means that there's usually more than meets the eye. Swedish plug-in powerhouse Softube's new Transient Shaper looks to take them on with some extra features. SPL's Transient Designer is the most renowned tool in this category, and there are many more on the market. They increases the level of an attack or bring up the sound's tail in a more transparent way than compression allows. This use of compression has some drawbacks, however: low frequencies can suffer, varying signal levels can dramatically influence the compressor's response, and each compressor can introduce its own character. MIDI-programmed kicks, for example, tend to have a static volume level but are more often than not compressed to increase punch or bring up the tail of the sound. Often when electronic music producers reach for compression, they're not actually trying to compress, at least not in the traditional sense.When you're really pushing a compressor on a percussive source recorded with some ambiance in the signal, it does some marvelous things, as many know! The fig 8 pattern was the perfect blend of direct sound with the ambience being picked up from behind, plus rejection on the sides from too many off-axis reflections in an untreated room. Used some fairly generous compression (well actually an 1176 at 12:1 or 20:1 I believe) and everything just had that right coloration with barely any eq or verb at all. Mic was up about 3 feet and angled diagonally towards the source with the low-cut engaged. It was in an untreated room with hardwood floors outside my control room. I tried recording some percussion layers (tamborurine, shaker and bongos) for a recent tune with a fig 8 ribbon mic through a neve emu pre for the first time and it sounded f-ing fantastic.
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