Transient Design

In recent years the "sound wars" have lead to a generation of producers who compress every sound source, then the track in which it is placed, then the bus to which it is grouped and then the master bus.

Now compression by itself has a place, even on every track if you wish but the important mistake many new users make is "over-compression". Over-compression takes 2 forms in my opinion, micro & macro.

Micro - Over-compression on the micro level is done when appropriate care is not taken to the attack and release times on the compressor. The first few milliseconds of a sound are vital to its overall character and these milliseconds are known as the transient.

Macro - Macro compression is when you are trying to create a contrast between, say a heavily compressed bass line and a a snappy drum and bass loop. Here my aim is often to give tracks the dynamic space they deserve, if you want a bunch of pads to clash and create a modern Debussian style colour then a bus compression may work but if you want the drums to cut through the mess - transient design is your friend.

There of course transient modulation plug-ins and these are mainly for adding in some transients to pre-compressed samples to add a bit of a click that has been removed, in my experience they serve a purpose but I am far more likely to use these plug-ins to reduce transients from home-recorded sources so they fit together with the rest of my soundscape, they are worth downloading and playing with on your own sounds!.

Noisia (well known Drum and Bass producers) are known as "the producer`s producers" as they have a very good production style and are fantastic at creating unique sounds in their work. They have been known to take a drum and put the transient on a different track to the body of a sound. The benefit of this approach is to allow for extreme distortions and effects to be applied to the body of a drum whilst preserving the transient and drawing the listeners ear to the hit.

In my course I will cover in depth how compression relates to each type of sound as well as the advanced techniques such as mid/side multi-band compression can solidify your mix busses and mastering of an audio sequence.

If you have any subjects you want me to go deeply into, let me know.