Full-Spectrum Transient Designers: A transient designer is basically an automatic “smart-volume – envelope-manipulation tool” which gives you the ability to accentuate the attack and sustain portions of a signal with the turn of a few simple knobs.NOTE: Although you can really go-to-town on trying to perfect your attack times on a per-drum basis, I often find that a simple compressor like the SSL E-Channel does a great job of preventing over-thinking and encouraging a quick workflow. A good rule of thumb when it comes to compressing drums is to stick between the 10-30ms attack-range in order to just let the initial transients through unharmed. As you can see, on this setting the compressor is reacting to the signal at a much quicker time of 5ms or so.īoth of the compression settings I’ve demonstrated above are valid, and offer two distinctly different flavours of PUNCH. Example #2: In this second example I ran the same test through the SSL compressor’s “fast” attack setting.As a result, we have a nice initial-attack envelope at the beginning of our signal. As you can see from the processed waveform on the first channel, it took around 30ms for the compression to fully kick-in. Example #1: In the example above I processed a 1kHz sine-wave through an SSL E-Channel Compressor on the “slow” attack setting with -10dB of gain reduction.Some Visual Representations Of “Accentuation Compression”: Alongside helping to level-out the performance, this will also effectively give you “X” amount of additional transient-gain depending on how much compression is being applied to the signal.
Using a compressor with a medium-slow attack between 10-30ms depending on the drum will allow for the initial stick attack to pass through the compression threshold untouched. The most classic way of increasing the initial click/smack of a drum is through the use of slow-attack compression: Here are a few different methods you can use to manipulate your drum transients: In this Blog we’ll take a look at some of the many tricks we can use in order to a achieve a punchy, rhythmic backbone of a drum sound.ġ – Make Them Pop! (Transient Enhancement):Īn important part to making your drums poke through a dense mix and sound exciting is attack-enhancement. The sheer amount of variables and decisions that come into play while capturing each individual element makes drums one of the most time-consuming and complex instruments to get right at pretty much every step of the production process. This week, we’ll be taking a look at an instrument that forms the foundations on which a solid mix is built:
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In this weekly series of Blogs I’ll attempt to take you through some of the most popular and effective audio processing techniques used in professional studios all over the world.Įach installment of this series will focus on a different instrument and provide you with links to relevant video examples of industry-leading engineers demonstrating these techniques. Mixing Secrets – Volume 3: Drums | By Thomas Brett | Introduction to the series: