Mix/production miniseries ep. 2/10: Transient hierarchy
Transient tools are all the rage. They are in style. Every company has their own.
There's many benefits to using them, but also, I hear the misuse.
Where and how have I used them in my daily mix work and productions?
A practical tip and thoughts here. Not genre-specific at all.
(By the way, I've added seats for each personal feedback tier)
📝 Further thoughts on the topic:
Not all sounds need attack. Period. Makes a mix hectic.
It's the percussive sounds that often do, but also, a lot of times, you simply don't need to boost them with a transient tool, but like in this case, it can be used to get one sound from the way of another for an effect.
Every now and then I get to treat mixes where it's been used on everything, and that is not great: for example, sometimes a producer may use it on all perc sounds, mid basses, synths, and it just makes things messy. Elements like hihats, bongos etc rarely need their transient boosted either: they're supposed to sound fairly relaxed.
That 10 ms attack does not equal fatness of drums, at all!
There's even been many vocal tracks I've mixed this year where I've used a transient tool to round its attack after a producer has clearly boosted it: sounds really bad, as all the s-sounds, lip smacks, saliva etc gets boosted. Ewww.
Think about the natural speech we hear daily: it does not need attack. Drums do, and even they can have some in moderation.
Use the rounding to your advantage: in a way it can highlight an element, as others will ask for less attention.
Comments (6)
Everything you’re saying seems so obvious, but coming up with it yourself—that’s the genius of it. You’re a master! Once again, I’ll say the same thing: your tutorials are pure gold. In just a few minutes, you solve problems that most people would never even think of on their own. All the best! Brilliant tutorial!
Had missed this (sometimes there's no notifications for comments), but thank you man :-)
How did you get the kick in “Thin Line” to punch through so well? Or how would you approach that nowadays? I'm trying to do something similar with a 909 kick but can't get the low end as solid as that reference.
Hadn't seen this comment either - sometimes there's no notifications. It's been a while since Thin Line but I have the project still on my backups, so I can't remember! It was probably a decent kick to begin with. Could take a look!
Any thoughts on this during the sound design stage? I hear that modern D&B and bass music need lots of transient focus/peak management since it is pushed so loud, sometimes into the mid -4 to high -2 range. I see a lot of producers stacking fully boosted instances of st4b (or other transient shapers) on their drum bus and bass harmonics groups.
Especially when going loud, you don't want a ton of transients (or brightness or tons of loud, sustaining sounds): whatever you're using for squashing the peaks will have to work extra hard if you have very strong transient stuff. So, for loud, I wouldn't _boost_ the transients. With the mega loud stuff, limiting things on tracks may be a good idea. If someone is fully boosting a transient tool, something is off. I'll add sometimes I get premasters or tracks that feel very ticky, and the reason may be the producer was using transient boosters but didn't even hear it, as master limiter was taming it…then it falls on my desk with all the tickiness finally coming through. I think to some extent transient tools are slightly misused or maybe even misunderstood.