XY Transient
How it hits, and how long it stays.
- Formats
- VST3 · AU · LV2
- Platforms
- Windows · macOS · Linux
- Requirements
- 64-bit host, stereo in and out · 44.1 to 192 kHz · macOS 11 or newer, Windows 10 or newer, Linux x64 · 599 samples of latency at 48 kHz, reported to the host — a mixing plug-in rather than one to track through
A transient shaper usually gives you attack and sustain and leaves the rest to you: which band, how fast, how much, and what to do about the cymbals that duck every time the kick lands.
XY Transient asks for two decisions.
- X — Size, TIGHT to BIG. How much room the hit is allowed to take up in time. Left shortens it; right lets it ring on.
- Y — Impact, SOFT to PUNCHY. How hard the front edge lands. Down rounds it off; up sharpens it.
Everything else — five bands, the detector, the lookahead, the shaping curves and the saturation that comes with the punchier settings — is derived from where the dot sits and from what the material is doing.
What is behind the pad
- Five bands, split with linear phase, so they sum back to the input rather than to a phase-rotated copy of it.
- A source profiler that tells a kick from a snare from a cymbal wash and weights the bands accordingly.
- Lookahead detection, so the gain is already in the right place when the hit arrives.
- Loudness compensation, so a change in shape is not heard as a change in level.
- Oversampled saturation on the punchier settings, kept out of the path entirely when it is not being used.
- Delta, to hear only what the plug-in is adding or taking away.
The cymbals stay where you put them
The usual failure of a wideband transient shaper on a drum bus is that tightening the kick pulls the whole top end down with it. Here the detector works per band and the profiler decides which bands a given hit belongs to. With a steady 9 kHz tone under a kick every 500 ms, the tone moves by at most 1.1 dB at the TIGHT setting and in the tight presets.
Presets
16 plus Custom: Gentle Shape, Tight Kick, Bigger Kick, Soft Kick, Techno Punch, Snare Snap, Big Snare, Controlled Hats, Big Toms, Dry Percussion, Room Killer, Drum Bus Punch, Drum Bus Tight, Bass Pluck, Bass Bigger and Soft Guitar.
Where it fits
On a kick or snare, to decide how much room it takes. On a drum bus, where TIGHT shortens the low end without pulling the cymbals down with it. On percussion that needs to stop ringing. On a bass pluck or a guitar, where the attack is the part that carries.
The linear-phase split costs 12.5 ms of latency at 48 kHz, which your host compensates for. It is a mixing plug-in rather than one to track through.
Tested before it ships
pluginval at strictness 10 passes on Windows, macOS and Linux, and auval passes for the
Audio Unit, on top of 35 measured gates per sample rate covering attack, click, pumping, loudness
match and peak control. Mix 0 % is the input bit for bit. Output is bit-identical from 1 to 8192
samples per block, and the same material shaped at 22.05 kHz through 384 kHz gives gain curves
within about 0.1 dB of each other. Transport stop and locate start clean rather than from
whatever played last. NaN, infinity or an absurd sample is contained on the way in and the engine
recovers within a second; silence in is exact silence out.
Watch it
Screenshots
Drum Bus Tight. Left shortens how much room the hit takes up in time; the envelope display shows what is left of it. Top left is as short and as hard as the pad goes — the front edge sharpened and the tail cut away. Big Snare. Right lets the hit ring on; the loudness compensation keeps that from being heard as a level jump. Delta plays only what the plug-in is adding or taking away.
Hear it
- Drum kitKick, snare and hats together from a 100 BPM Future Pop Music construction kit — the case a transient shaper usually gets wrong. Dry is the untouched source file and every other file is the plug-in at the same loudness; it compensates loudness itself, so none of these needed more than 0.2 dB of help. What changes is the shape of the hit, not its level, and tightening the low end here does not pull the hats down with it. In at −10 dBFS, no limiter.0:00–:––Level100%
- KickThe kick on its own, where the envelope is easiest to hear. Soft Kick takes 5.7 dB out of the first five milliseconds and leaves the body where it was; Room Killer takes 2.9 dB out of the 5–20 ms window. Those are the sizes a transient shaper works in at matched loudness.0:00–:––Level100%
- BassA bass line from the same kit, where the attack is the part that carries and the rest is sustain to be decided on.0:00–:––Level100%
Release notes
1.0.0
- First stable release. Signed and notarised on macOS, with a Developer ID installer and no Gatekeeper detour.
- Two decisions instead of six. X is Size, TIGHT to BIG: how much room the hit is allowed to take up in time. Y is Impact, SOFT to PUNCHY: how hard the front edge lands.
- Five bands split with linear phase, so they sum back to the input rather than to a phase-rotated copy of it, and switching bypass does not change the attack of a kick.
- A source profiler that tells a kick from a snare from a cymbal wash and weights the bands accordingly, with lookahead detection so the gain is already in place when the hit arrives.
- Tightening the low end does not duck the top: with a steady 9 kHz tone under a kick every 500 ms, the tone moves by at most 1.1 dB at the TIGHT setting.
- Loudness compensation, so a change in shape is not heard as a change in level, and oversampled saturation on the punchier settings that stays out of the path entirely when it is not in use.
- 16 presets plus Custom, and Delta to hear only what the plug-in is adding or taking away.
- Validated with pluginval at strictness 10 on Windows, macOS and Linux and with Apple's auval, plus 35 measured gates per sample rate covering attack, click, pumping, loudness match and peak control.
From the journal
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