Softube Transient Shaper

Plugin of the Week is a series on ADSR where Echo Sound Works looks at a mixing/production plugin highlighting how it’s been used in recent mixes or sound design projects.

Week 01 looks at Softube’s transient shaper.

Being able to control the attack and decay of a sound is tremendously useful for anyone mixing music. But Softube’s Transient Shaper goes beyond that due to the fact that it’s a dual band processor.

This means that the user can set it to affect only the treble or bass portion of a sound—separately for the Sustain and Punch parameters—and leave the rest untouched. This opens up a new realm of possibilities.

Transient shaping has become a vital technique in music mixing. The ability to sharpen or soften the onset of a sound, as well as lengthen or shorten the decay, has proven very useful for giving each sound just the right size and position in the mix. Transient Shaper takes this concept one step further, by letting the user affect either the entire frequency range—as most similar tools—or only the treble frequencies or bass frequencies.