Transient Designer Tips & Tricks

Here’s a few tips and tricks I read about Transient Designer a long while back.  I’m not sure where I found these – copied them into my Evernote without noting the location!

Boosting its attack controls on drum tracks can give kick, snare and toms the extra punch often needed to make them come alive. When you’re processing tom tracks, lowering the TD4′s sustain controls is a much more transparent (and speedier) remedy for reining in timpani-like sustain than smothering batter heads with duct tape. And for reducing excessive cymbal bleed into tom mics, just turn the TD4′s sustain controls counterclockwise for inputted toms and you’re done.

I wouldn’t dream of mixing a drum kit in my room without Transient Designer.  However, Transient Designer sounds great on more than just drums. Crank that sustain knob on soaring guitar solos to make David Gilmour blush. Or boost the attack on dampened ostinato parts played low on a six-stringer to make that rock ‘n’ roll vamp jump. These are just a few of the well-known — but powerful — applications that the TD excel at.

Tight, discrete-sounding drum tracks are cool, but trash is a bash. When your drums’ overhead mics sound like they were placed in a shoe closet and you’d prefer the sound of an empty warehouse, Transient Designer can provide instantaneous moving services. Route the stereo room mics through two of the TD’s linked channels (channels 1 and 2, or 3 and 4) and crank the unit’s attack controls to put a point on the traps. Then, slowly raise the sustain controls on both channels to bring up the room tone for an “all-buttons-in,” 1176-type sound — without pumping cymbals. Fine-tune the sustain control settings so that the room mics’ envelope more or less ends on the desired upbeat or downbeat for a driving rhythmic effect.

Are you bored with using the same tired reverb patches on your productions? Patch your reverb’s left- and right-channel outputs through linked Transient Designer channels to add a little pizzazz. Boost both attack controls on TD to the max and lower the sustain controls to their minimum settings. You’ll notice that the reverb’s intensity at its onset will subtly increase while the apparent decay time decreases.

Take the exact opposite approach to process a reverb patch so that it exhibits a pyramidal slope. Turn Transient Designer’s attack controls on two linked channels fully counterclockwise and crank the sustain controls to the max. With these settings, the onset of the reverb patched through Transient Designer will be de-emphasized, but the effect will bloom and then tail off over time (as long as the reverb program’s decay time is set to a sufficient length so that it continues evolving during the unit’s sustain phase).

Transient Designer can also be used to superimpose the dynamics of one track onto those of unrelated tracks. For example, patch two mults of a kick drum track into channels 1 and 3 of TD and send the outputs of those two channels “out to get pizza” (i.e., somewhere they won’t be heard). Patch a stereo keyboard track into TD’s channels 2 and 4 and activate both of the unit’s Link switches. Next, boost channels 1 and 3 attack controls to emphasize the kick drum’s slammin’ nature. TD will dynamically adjust the attack of its processed keyboard tracks to track the dynamics of the kick drum. Try it — you’ll get the point!

Post #100

I had no idea when I started this blog that it would still be around over 2 years to see post #100.  To date, I’ve had over 20,000 hits since I started this blog in 2007, which is pretty amazing.  Thank you to everyone who I know reads and comments and the many more I’ve never met.

I’ve got lots more content in the queue so we’ll see where this goes over the next few months.  I’ve really enjoyed getting back into writing regularly!

Transient Designer has come to Venue!

Its a great day to be a Venue engineer! Somehow I missed its initial release a few weeks ago, but yesterday I loaded the new SPL Transient Designer TDM plug-in and enjoyed sweet audio bliss!

Why so excited? Danny Cox, Kensington’s music director and accomplished studio drummer, first introduced me to a 4-channel hardware version of the Transient Designer a few years ago and I had one in our previous PM1D rig for maybe 6 months. In that time, I quickly found it to be one of those magic tools that just makes things sound better.

Its very simple to use – only attack and sustain controls – and the combination allows the engineer to completely reshape the attack and sustain characteristics of a sound. On snare, adding some sustain adds a natural verb of sort to an otherwise too tight sound. On toms, reducing the sustain a few clicks gives a similar effect to taping up a drum that’s a bit too resonant. On kick, dynamically adjust the click of the tone vs the sustain. On piano, add or reduce the initial attack of the note.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’m a big proponent of getting the mix right at the source. While Transient Designer made its name in the industry to fix in the mix otherwise poorly recorded tracks, I found it provided a great tool to adjust for the variety of styles of drummers that play on our stage and make otherwise great tones even better. The whole key to using it effectively is moderation.

Now on any given week I will have at least 6 or 7 instances of the plug-in set up in my rack on kick in and out, snare 1 and 2, rack & floor toms, & piano.

Dave Stagl said today that its a bit early, but it seems likely that Transient Designer TDM is destined to become another must-have plug-in for Venue. I must agree! Much in the same vane as Cranesong Phoenix, Rane Serato Dynamics, & the Pultec/Fairchild combo on guitars, Transient Designer will be a staple of my live setup going forward.

SPL has a 14-day demo available on their site. But be warned: don’t try it unless you’re prepared to purchase!

Rebooting Venue

Question: What is the recommendation regarding how often a Venue system should go through the shutdown and startup process? Our console is installed in a permanent venue so it is easy to just turn off the displays and rest of gear at FOH while leaving the FOH rack on 24 hours a day on a UPS. Does Venue run better if it is software reset each day? Its occurred to me the console could be like any other Windows machine where it runs better with daily reboots.

Background: I had a Bombfactory BF-3A inserted on a couple of vocals, using it for the first time, and experienced a strange scenario. When we started the song in rehearsal, suddenly no audio was passing through the channel strip for the vocals with the BF-3A inserted. There was signal showing up on the signal meter, but not hitting the PQ or main busses. Unassigning the channel from any VCAs or mute groups didn’t make a difference. Going to the plug-in screen for said channel caused the screen to not redraw completely with a blank space where the plug-in should be. After trying to cycle to another screen and back, the entire software locked up. I could still control levels from the control surface, but said vocal channels would not pass audio. Scary!!!

Resolution from Digidesign engineer: While the system is designed to be able to run with no end, it is difficult for *any* system to actually *prove* that no bug is going to appear just because the system was up for too long. You’d have to perform full regression suites (which includes all configurations) with weeks of up times. It’s just not realistic. While you can have a few systems kept up & running the same configuration for a large number of days, it’s impossible to do with all configurations SW/HW (how many thousands exists?).

A classic problem for SW is counters rollover. If your system does include counters (and it pretty much guarantied to have some, no matter the OS, in your applications or drivers), you have some level of risk exposure. The textbook example of this was found in Windows 95/98 which crashed after 49.xxx days (http://news.cnet.com/Windows-may-cra…_3-222391.html). This is the type of issues that have given Windows a bad reputation, but the same condition happens in so many different ways. You also have potential memory leaks slowly saturating VM, etc. I’d like to tell you that we keep a bunch of systems running for over 50 days in each SW/HW configuration…

So let’s be practical: if your system has been running 24/7 for more than a week, you are in an increasingly less tested condition. Your system won’t burst into flames, but then, the chances that something is going to misbehave start to grow. So if a daily shutdown doesn’t work in your situation, I’d recommend a weekly restart. I pick a week because it’s the most practical period to remember. That will keep you in a reasonable uptime range, and if you forget it once in a while, it shouldn’t matter.

Additional: I also reinstalled the Bomb Factory plug-ins just to make sure there was nothing corrupt there. I’m using the BF-3A regularly since the incident and haven’t had any more strange behavior. I don’t know for certain that the problem was caused by too much runtime without a restart. Since it was the first time I used the plug-in, it is possible that something was corrupted in the initial install.

Lesson: Restart the console. Don’t leave the mix engine on 24/7. And test plug-ins before using them in a pressure environment since anything is possible in the world of software. I’ve had strange behavior from a PM1D and now I can say I’ve had a strange scenario with Digidesign Venue. Hopefully it doesn’t happen again.

Mix Engineers…Listen up!

If you’re like me and passionate about the art of mixing audio, you know that really good resource material on this topic is elusive. Sure, every once in a while I run across a well written article on mixing guitars or drums, but I found a book a few weeks ago that should be required reading for anyone who mixes music. We’re talking that this book should be considered in the same sentence as the Yamaha Sound Reinforcement Handbook.

“Mixing Audio”, by Roey Izhaki is the most complete resource on the art of mixing music that I’ve ever seen. Content spans from basic (the four-band division of the frequency spectrum) to advanced (dynamic equalization) and there are tips and trick all along. There’s a great balance between the science (such as stabilizing the mix) and the art (mixing vision and creative aspects), theory (how exactly the attack on a compressor works) and practice (how to add punch to a kick using the attack). Along with 584 pages of discussion, there are tons of illustrations and over 2000 audio tracks on the included DVD to demonstrate every concept.

Finally, the icing on the cake is 4 sample mixes at the end of the book, their dedicated chapters that outline every plug-in and processing used on each track, and more than 1000 audio samples provide a demonstration of how everything is put into practice for the creation of a professional sounding mix.

Click here to see the table of contents.

I’ve never seen anything like this book. While it was written from a studio mix perspective, there are so many take aways for live audio and so it is rocking my world. Putting the knowledge you’ll learn into practice will still require years of experience, but this book is the best reference I’ve ever seen on the topic.

Do me a favor and go to Amazon right now and order. Seriously. Go now. I’ve seen it for as much as $50 at Borders so the Amazon price is quite a deal!