While being able to shape the onset of drum sounds can add excitement and pop, real drum hits need some help before they get the transient treatment. Read on to learn how…

What Is Transient Shaping?

For a long time the only control engineers had over the transient portion of any recorded sound was by the judicious use of mic choice and/or placement. With so much transient information present in drum sounds, it is these especially that can benefit from creative manipulation. Traditionally, engineers have reached for condenser mics to resolve the micro-timescales that transients inhabit, with the alternative of moving coil mics’ slower response being better suited to rounding these out for blunter, fatter recordings.

Later on, hardware boxes such as SPL’s Transient Shaper came along, which for the first time afforded engineers further creative possibilities with simple Attack and Sustain controls for a handful of channels. This was especially useful when working to tape when used in combination with condenser mic recordings, allowing transient events to be augmented, and/or the sustain of sources to be optimised.

Considerations With Transient Processing

With any kind of dynamic processing, very small variations of the input signal’s level can result in big changes in the amount of processing applied. In any application where high ratios are involved, such as in limiting, these variations’ effects are most noticeable. When it comes to any upward process, such as those used to emphasise attack transients, even subtle processing can push a channel into clipping.

Upstream Conditioning

What is needed is a further dynamic process in front of the transient processing so that the latter ‘sees’ a consistent level to work with. In the DAW, audio plugin order is the name of the game, with virtually all observing the top-to-bottom signal flow which sees the pre-transient processing at the top feeding into the transient process below.

Using another microdynamic process such as compression is not always desirable, as this process intrinsically changes the character of the sound as well which is not the aim in this case (compression can of course be used further downstream if required).

Using a macro dynamic method such as clip gain automation of entire events provides a better solution as it does not subvert the waveform (unlike compression). Most DAWs give users the ability to split out drum hits into individual events using tools such as Pro Tools’ Strip Silence, or Reaper’s Dynamic Split, but even with these aids, the problem here is that any manual level rides trade precision for time and/or accuracy.

A Third Way

Using a dedicated leveller such Drum Leveler from Sound Radix upstream of transient processing provides a best-of-all worlds approach by bringing all the automated control of a ‘classical’ compressor and the unadulterated waveforms afforded by whole-event processing such as clip gain or pre-insert fader rides. Next time you use a transient processor to bring some thwack, why not try an advanced levelling tool in front of it? Or to put it another way, why wouldn’t you?