Wsm August 2012

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Dispatch Sonar 4K S-type Comp

SPL Transient Designe

differences between sound modules and sample modules, let’s continue on and talk about some more compression settings for drum machine type sounds. Let’s take a look at a snare drum. Whether it be an 808 snare or a real Ludwig, a compressor can control how that snare sounds. The release time will give it more resonance, the attack time will let the compressor relax before it kicks in if you use a longer time, and make the compressor kick in instantly if you use a shorter one and control how the transient attack comes through.

If I adjust the release to a longer time, I lose the sustain in the snare which is what I wanted in this case. If I shorten the attack time, with that release setting I have, you will hear just snare strainers and no attack/crack of the snare. The attack setting would remove the “crack”. So we have a longer setting so that the crack comes through. With the threshold setting you see there, I’m removing about -9dB of gain to make this particular snare sound the way I want.

The threshold and ratio controls tell the compressor how hard to hit. The more threshold you use, the more you instruments without messing with all hear the compressor. The more ratio the compressor controls you’d have to you use, the more the threshold set if you were using a regular allows you to adjust how much compressor. My favorite is the SPL compression you hear. If we used a Transient Designer. With just two ratio of 5:1 with a threshold of -20dB, To achieve this same thing without knobs, this thing can bring a dead (this of course also depends on your using a compressor with even better snare, kick, toms or even a guitar to attack and release times) and then results, we can use what is called a life. My second choice would be the you set the ratio to 2:1, you will “Transient Designer”. These come with Stillwell Transient Monster. Cakewalk notice less compression and less many different names yet they do the has one that is also pretty cool. artifacts than you may have heard same thing. Picture them as an Here’s what they look like. when the ratio was set to 5:1. effected compressor that comes out of the box allowing you to create more You may want a longer release time to crack and sustain out of your Stillwell Transient Monster shorten the snare resonance. You may want the snare to sustain longer. If so, shorter release times allow the snare resonance to last longer along with longer attacks. So the compressor can control all this and literally tailor the sound. This is an instance of what a compressor setting would look like if we were using it to make a snare drum have more crack and sustain longer using the Sonar X1 PC 4k Stype compressor. August 2012

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