Taking the plunge...

Counterparts · Post by **Counterparts** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 11:37 am

Eek, I've just decided to buy the Transient Designer for my Scope system (well, it's my birthday pretty sune, so this is my "treat" to myself). The plastic is flexing alarmingly...

Apart from drum sounds, what other applications do you ("you" being an SPL user

) use this for? Any tips?

Royston

Post by **hubird** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 6:38 pm

everything that could benefit from enlarged attack phase OR diminished release phase

More attack puts the sound more in front of the mix without really giving it more dB volume.
Mostly a 2 - 2,5 clock posisition is enough.
You could even reduce the volume of a sound after pushing the attack, giving room to other instruments.

Less sustain brings back 'room' in a loop, and therefor can also used to reduce the reverb part of a sound, works terrific, as Astro will confirm

And the opposit will work too

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 8:40 pm

yeah, the reverb 'trick' is really impressive

I could post some snippets, even if it's copyrighted, probably noone will care about a few seconds and the stuff is bloody old anyway.

Aside from that your guitar will love it - more attack brings more metal into the strings and less on the exreme other side can almost fake a violin

my whimpy Casio sax can't do without the attack shift anymore...
TD is a great plugin, one of those few totally simple, yet ingenious things.

cheers, Tom

Post by **hubird** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 9:52 pm

to add this:
the attack phase (the first transients so to say) makes an instrument 'recognisable', so you could recognise a trumpet as a eh trumpet

by the initial few milliseconds (well, some hundreds then).
The rest of it, the release phase, could be identified like an organ f.e....
So, concerning the attack, the TD works also as a kind of psycho-acoustical effect, things get 'louder' and more precise without using a compressor, exiter or eq.

It's just stupid that there is no preset possibility.
In stereo settings (usual) you *always* have to make the L/R link active, and
the effect settings are a bit clumsy to set.
Typing the values works best.
Take care, the volume changes drastically if you touch the attack setting...
Compare that with the knob handling of the Solaris...exemplary that is!

[ This Message was edited by: hubird on 2005-02-03 22:03 ]

Counterparts · Post by **Counterparts** » Fri Feb 04, 2005 4:56 am

Cheers guys...I had a little play with it last night.

Impressive:

DSP useage (does it use any?

)
The effect! It is amazing.

Not so impressive:

Lack of bypass switch (why?)
No presets (I can live with that)

Royston

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Fri Feb 04, 2005 9:06 am

there is a bypass switch - top left corner of the mono, below the curve display in the stereo version.
too late at night ?

cheers, tom

Counterparts · Post by **Counterparts** » Fri Feb 04, 2005 9:35 am

astroman wrote:
there is a bypass switch - top left corner of the mono, below the curve display in the stereo version.
too late at night ?

Pretty late, several largers...

I was looking for the standard bypass symbol in the standard place...

dbmac · Post by **dbmac** » Fri Feb 04, 2005 9:52 am

Unfortunately the bypass switch is post-gain, makes the bypass kind of useless.

/dave

[ This Message was edited by: dbmac on 2005-02-04 09:53 ]

Post by **hubird** » Fri Feb 04, 2005 9:59 am

Speaking about bypass buttons...
I did notice something these days I wasn't aware of before...

If you take a VST plug, say a reverb, and mute it with the standard red VST button, the signal is removed completely, just as you'd expect.

If you 'bypass' a Scope plug by clicking on the generally used speaker icon on the top bar of the plug, the signal passes the plug, with the volume determined by the effect send knob...

So, if you're A-B-ing the sound with and without the plug being applied, you don't have the ideal test situation...you will easily perform (out of) phasing and volume unwantities.

In fact, this little speaker icon is only usefull when you use the plugin as real insert effect (so also in an audio chain right in the project window)...

The switch that is functioning identical to the red VST knob is the on/off switch of the mixer's insert fields (in case of insert use of an effect) or the mixer's effect send on/off switch.

What a drag...I should have noticed this before

Now I have to redo all my mixes of the last 4,5 years

have to check the 'bypass' switch of TD, can't remember if it also bypasses the in-out volume settings

edit: ahh, mentioned already by dbmac, hehe

[ This Message was edited by: hubird on 2005-02-04 10:02 ]

Counterparts · Post by **Counterparts** » Fri Feb 04, 2005 10:38 am

Counterparts wrote:
Pretty late, several largers...

These are of course somewhat bigger than "lagers"

*hic!*

Post by **hubird** » Fri Feb 04, 2005 1:37 pm

Immanuel · Post by **Immanuel** » Sat Feb 05, 2005 6:55 am

You can compensate for the strange TD bypass, by using SpaceFs MIDI insert device.

Counterparts · Post by **Counterparts** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 5:51 am

hubird wrote:
Typing the values works best.

Um...I tried this, but it seemed to make very coarse adjustments. Did you mean select the control (click on it) then type a number key?

After playing with the device a bit more, I do have a criticism which is that you can't make subtle enough changes...even the smallest step has quite an effect on the sound. I wanted to try it on the snare in "whatgoesaround", but the smallest change gave it too much bite, so I had to use another approach to make the drums snappier.

Royston

Post by **hubird** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 8:51 am

Nice idea Immanuel, thanks

CP, typing numbers only with the L/R gain values, sorry

Typing will prevent you from getting big volume changes when touching the Gain knobs.

Did you correct for gain after trying different Attack values?
I guess so, but you never know

I don't really have problems with TD's 'resolution'.

It would be fantastic if TD had an automatic 'keep-gain/out-constant' button

darkrezin · Post by **darkrezin** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 10:22 am

Haven't got Scope handy at the moment, but how about clicking a control, then using the left/right arrow keys to change the value?

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 10:34 am

There's a whole bunch of usefull keys, as from the manual:

Enter switches between default and last knob position,
Page up/down for coarse and
Arrow L/R for fine tuning,
0-9 in 10 steps from min to max.

On PC, mouse scrolls also work. Try it on frequency divider, MVC tune, etc, where it nicely matches musical steps. Tried this on Mac, but mouse scroll doesn't seem do anything for SFP. I never thought I used it so much untill I was working on a friend's Mac...

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 10:37 am

no way - the resolution of the control is just like that. Even grainy enough for my mousewheel

cheers, Tom

Counterparts · Post by **Counterparts** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 11:29 am

at0m|c wrote:
Arrow L/R for fine tuning,

*shakes dust from brain*

Thanks for the reminder! I usually use the "mouse movement far away from control" trick to get fine adjustments.

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 12:31 pm

astroman, I'm not sure that I understand what you mean...
What I meant was, that if you select for example MVC tune and scroll on it with the mouse, it will move from 0 to 2,5,8... that's what I meant by musically. It doesn't take intermediate values by scrolling.
Scrolling a FrequencyDivider's value's for example goes in steps of 6, or (24/)6. Isn't that convenient to tweak these parameters?

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 2:06 pm

oops, I was just and only commenting the knobs on the Transient Designer. There's nothing one can do about their stepsize.
My post 'landed' behind yours because I still had it on the screen while you posted

cheers, Tom
... just recently discovered those dial keys - finally a way to comfortably scroll through the Wavetable OSCs

[ This Message was edited by: astroman on 2005-02-07 14:11 ]