TDesign
“The Transient Former
The idea behind the Transient Former TDESIGN is to give the user direct control over the attack and sustain characteristics of natural sounds, and though this sounds less than revolutionary, you only have to play with the unit for a few minutes to realise that the Transient Former is a very powerful creative tool. For example, you can take a recording of an unremarkable drum kit and dial in some really hard-hitting attack or take a very percussive sound and soften the attack. You can also use the sustain control to work on the decay portion of sounds, and with drums you can tighten up the sound to give a fast, dry decay or you can make them ring as though you’d taken the dampers off the kit. It’s just like having remote control over the amount of damping tape stuck to the drum heads, but after the recording. Other than a compressor this process is independent of level and the effect is the same regardless of whether the input signal is loud or soft.
Unique to TDESIGN is the ability to shape the transient not only amplitude wise but also with a dynamically controlled 24 dB lowpass filter with resonance control. This gives you the opportunity to change the sound in a way which normally is only possible if you recreate it with a synthesizer !
The transient design process works best on drums and other material which exhibits strong rhythmical components. But it’s really worth to try it with other input sources…
