User Manual

UAD Powered Plug-Ins Manual - 310 - Chapter 36: SPL Transient Designer
Guitars Use the Transient Designer on guitars to soften the sound by lowering the AT-
TACK. Increase ATTACK for in-the-face sounds, which is very useful and
works particularly well for picking guitars. Or blow life and juice into quietly
played guitar parts.
Distorted guitars usually are very compressed, thus not very dynamic. Simply
increase the ATTACK to get a clearer sound with more precision and better in-
tonation despite any distortion.
Heavy distortion also leads to very long sustain. The sound tends to become
mushy; simply reduce SUSTAIN to change that. If you, how- ever, want to cre-
ate soaring guitar solos that would make even David Gilmour blush, just
crank up the SUSTAIN control to the max and there you go.
With miced acoustic guitars you can emphasize the room sound by turning up
SUSTAIN. If you want the guitars to sound more intimate and with less ambi-
ence, simply reduce SUSTAIN.
Bass: Staccato
vs. Legato
Speaking of bass: Imagine a too sluggishly played bass track... you may not
have to re-record it: Reduce the SUSTAIN until you can hear clear gaps be-
tween the downbeats—the legato will turn into a nice staccato, driving the
rhythm-section forward.
The Re-
Invention Of
Reverb
Always and everywhere the same reverb presets – boring, aren‘t they? Try
sending the output of your reverb through the Transient Designer. Now crank
the ATTACK control to the max and reduce SUSTAIN to a bare minimum. The
intensity of the reverb is now much higher in the beginning while the reverb
time is reduced.
The opposite can be just as intriguing: manipulate a reverb pattern so that it
takes on a pyramidal slope. Turn the ATTACK all the way to the left and SUS-
TAIN all the way to the right. Now the beginning of the reverb is strongly re-
duced whereas the sustain blossoms and seems almost endless (obviously that
will only happen if the decay of the reverb in the actual reverb device has
been set to a sufficient value—a signal must always be present as long as the
sustain time lasts.
You can also create a reverb effect that moves from one channel to the other.
Reverb presets with a long decay or a long pre-delay and especially those
that have flamboyant reflections set to appear after the beginning of the dif-
fuse reverberation tail are predestined for that. Insert the left and the right