Spikes in time

The transient shaper isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – producers seem to either ignore them or swear by them. These dynamics devices are, sort of, in a class of their own, capable of certain tricks that others aren’t, due to the different way in which they operate.

With the shortening of modern music’s dynamic range, you may think that transients would have lost their power altogether, but not so. In fact, transient shapers can be a way to combat this, eking out every last drop of potential from those squeezed transients with new tricks that keep the limit but enhance the sound.

SPL’s Transient Designer is a classic shaper design. With only three knobs – Attack, Sustain and Output Gain – the idea here is to increase or reduce the attack of transient sounds separately from any info that comes after, providing a way to tweak both, pulling them apart or bringing them closer as needed.

How is this different to standard compression? In some ways, it’s not. The end result is still dynamic range compression based on the transient profile of the signal, but one difference is how the transient shaper reacts to the signal’s peak to reduce all of it, like setting lookahead on a digital compressor, but in the analogue domain.

One way to create such a powerful attack in a sound is actually to ‘scoop’ the volume down just before it hits, creating a larger jump in level when it does. This trick is another thing that separates transient shapers from their compressor counterparts, which don’t have any settings baked in to define when and how much to reduce the level before a spike.

Another thing: with the circuitry (or algorithms) in place to identify transients and treat them separately from what comes after them, it’s also possible to perform more than just level tweaks to each. These days it’s possible to find software processors that will EQ transients or reduce their width, and perform similar operations to the sustain portions of the same sound passing through.

You can isolate transients using your DAW’s timeline functions, cutting and fading between the attack and body, which is usually quite definable from simply looking at the waveform. Use this technique to separate transients onto their own tracks, ready to change their width, add distortion or anything else you can do in your host software.

This is a not uncommon production practice: cutting and splicing parts of a kick signal to control the attack, body and tail of a kick. Getting control over a sound, or a few together, is quite easy.

Transient shaping may play a part in mastering, helping push the final peak into line, ensuring they’re helpful even when approaching the digital system’s ceiling. But this doesn’t mean transient shapers won’t play a big role in the mix engineer’s job before that stage.

These days, increasingly, the most important know-how for finishing a track using a transient shaper is having an awareness of how music streaming platforms turn down a track based on its dynamic range. Check out MeterPlugs’ Loudness Penalty website, for more info on this.