I’m thinking about getting a transient shaper plugin and was wondering what your favorites were. I am definitely going to be using it on kick and snare as I feel I can never quite get where I want with just sample layering, compression, and eq, but I am sure I would use it on more stuff as well once I get it. I was leaning towards surreal machines impact (multiband seems very nice), but wanted to know what you all like before I pull the trigger. I also imagine that eventides split eq would work for this as well.
A transient shaper affects the balance of volumes between the transient and the tail of a sound. Definitively not a low pass filter, but it can have the same result as a compressor, for sure.
Yeah, it’s a special kind of compressor, first introduced by SPL as the Transient Designer. VCA’s and a bunch of clever envelopes.
I believe the guy who invented it went on to start Elysia, who produce an updated version as the nvelope and other pretty awesome outboard gear (mostly System 500 format).
@RobertSyrett …all percussive sounds have their THREE parts…the very first ignition sparkle…the thump…and the tail…a transient shaper gives u shaping options on all of them…like an xtra envelope on top of the basic envelope…
while that very first sparkle IS THE ESSENTIAL one…the one u wanna tame or more often wanna spike out more…in 4 to the floor kiks for example, that very first transient is, what u want to translate at any given moment, no matter how crowdy ur overall arrangement gets…
so, a transient shaper gets ur best friend sooner than later…always.
Punctuate by Newfangled Audio, it’s my go to now and sometimes Physion by Eventide when I want to go crazy. But, as a Bitwig user, I’d say the same thing as @reeloy, the transient shaper in Bitwig is also very very good, quick, clean and powerful.
I can appreciate the qualitative description but I was hoping for a mathematical or engineering explanation. Or even what category transient shaping falls into.
Is sustain a saturation effect? Amplitude modulation? EQ?
If I’m not wrong I think it is just like an eq that first splits the signal into transient and non-transient parts and lets you eq each seperately (like eventide split eq).
@HBIII@reeloy after a bit of googling I found this thread on reddit from 8 years ago where the top comment describes transient shaping as “a level-independent dynamics processor. Like a compressor or expander but the amount of effect doesn’t vary with signal level.” Which raises the question, “what would provide the threshold to change the dynamics?”
The answer that would make sense to me would be frequency, since transients are high frequency audio events. Does that seem like a reasonable understanding?