Transient Shaping

There are a lot of different plugins on the market for shaping transients. Some of them are really good. When it comes to transient shaping, however, we are still employing some very fundamental techniques, but in an all-in-one way.

ATTACK / PUNCH

Normally if you want to add attack or punch to a transient you have to separate it from the sustain portion of the waveform. As I discuss in Compressors Demystified, simply boosting the gain or EQ to a track just adds gain to all parts of the track. Separating the transient from the sustain, however, allows you to boost and manage attack all by itself. Managing attack without separating it from these elements is a frustrating and unproductive experience.

Take for instance the attack of a snare or kick, two of the most critical attack instruments in music. If you apply Sustain Compression to a snare, you are essentially suppressing the non-attack part of the waveform. This allows you to now control all aspects of the snare attack without worrying about it also enhancing or increasing sustain.

Sustain compression is also an excellent technique to apply to vocals. By supressing sustain, I typically do this with parallel bus, you can increase the clarity of a vocal. It will cut through the mix better without simply adding unnecessary gain or potentially overpowering a sonically weak vocal track.

Simply put, if you aren’t Sustain Compressing your transient-heavy instruments with parallel compression, you probably aren’t going to compete with a professional mix.

SUSTAIN / TONE

Some Transient Shapers call the non-transient part of the waveform Sustain or Tone. Eventide’s Split EQ calls it Tone, while Softube’s Transient Shaper calls it Sustain. Whatever the case, if you are trying to manage non-transients, this can be an even trickier challenge.

In Compressors Demystified, I discuss enhancing the sustain or tone of a waveform, what occurs after the transient, as Transient Compression. If you remove attack from a waveform, and bring-up what’s left up in the mix, you will find it allows you to boost parts of that instrument that usually get drowned-out by the other tracks in the mix. This is a most obvious improvement to drums, and can result in a kind of Room Mic effect. But for other instruments it is equally as musical.

For example on a guitar, removing the transient and boosting the sustain allows you to add thickness to the instrument in the mix. With picking suppressed, a guitar will become more full, thicker, and saturate the mix more musically. But again, it is recommended you employ this with parallel compression.

For bass, string attack can sometimes be sufficient but body or tone is lacking. Isolating sustain from the transient and managing it separately is a great way to push the bass more into the mix without increasing attack. Again, a thicker and more present instrument.

TRANSIENT SHAPERS

So we have already covered what most transient shapers allow you to do: manage attack or sustain. And if you are somewhat skilled at compression, you don’t really need a transient shaper to get there. Is there anything else they bring to the table? Well, yes and no.

If you spend enough of your hard-earned dollars on plugins, or at least do a lot of demos, it is not too difficult to conclude there is really not a lot of innovation when it comes to new technology. Most new plugins seem to offer the same features we could achieve with one or two other plugins you probably already own. What you normally get with a new plugin is specialization.

If I were to duplicate the features in the Softube Transient Shaper, I would need a compressor, and EQ, and maybe a saturator depending on what kind of sound I was looking to achieve. So instead of employing a chain of plugins, I just have to use one. And that’s a big plus for a couple reasons.

First, many new to the art of transient shaping may not understand what is happening under the hood. With a single UI, they have all of the necessary functionality at their fingertips. This is a huge benefit to flattening the learning curve, especially for newbies. But this is also a double-edged blade.

Skipping the fundamentals is hardly ever a good way to learn. Which is why I write so frequently about fundamental techniques. Sure it may be boring, but if you plan to become a solid engineer, capable of working through a lot of tricky situations, you have got to know how the clock works.

Second, for experienced engineers, a fast workflow is necessary to maintain productive and creative momentum. Sure I can dial-in a compressor pretty quickly, and an EQ, and a saturator. But when I can get all three in a single $35 plugin, and get the same quality, you can bet I am going to give it a try.