In fact, when SPL brought out their original transient designer, engineers were so taken with the ability of the unit to completely transform their drum tracks that many of them saw the unit as an absolute studio essential. Don’t be deceived by the simplicity, as this processor can solve all sorts of problems and create just as many interesting effects.

The original hardware (and most software incarnations) only had a few knobs, which controlled attack and sustain. The processor used a combination of VCAs (voltage controlled amplifiers) and envelope followers to clamp down on specific areas of a sound’s transient events. The first transient designer was designed by Ruben Tilgner using his ‘differential envelope’ technology and the result was a two channel hardware processor released by Sound Performance Labs (SPL) of Germany. Let’s take a quick look at the process and its history. If you have never used a transient designer of any kind or are just not familiar with the process, at this point you may be wondering what I’m talking about. Let’s take a closer look at where these processors came from, how they work and see how we can use them in real world situations. There are also a few great free products that we’ll look at here. Sonnox, Universal Audio and SPL are now all supplying excellent solutions for transient design.

If you are not familiar with this breed of plug-in, it might be possible that you actually have one in your collection without even knowing it.Ĭubase and Logic both include Transient designers as part of their plug-in package and it is now possible to purchase high quality processors for this purpose that run on both dedicated DSP platforms and your native processor.

Transient designers have been given names such as transient modulators (Transmods), envelopers and signal modelers. It’s possible that you may already be aware of this type of processor, just by another name. With all these new emulations and interpretations of a classic processor becoming available, it's well worth familiarizing yourself with what could become an essential part of your production process.

Now, a number of DAWs and plug-ins are dragging the technology into the digital domain. Not long ago, transient designers were only available as hardware processors.

Mediafire spl transient designer