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!