Kilohearts Transient Shaper

Customize Attack Character

When you want to carefully tweak the punch of your snare, the ricki-ticki-ticking of your hi-hats, or the snappiness of a synth line, Kilohearts Transient Shaper is the right tool for the job.

Using a compressor is the most common way of adjusting the dynamics of a sound, but sometimes this can be a bit cumbersome. This is where Transient Shaper shines, giving you very direct control over the character of both the attack and sustaining sections of the sound in a way that’s simple to understand and tweak.

I really love Transient Shaper! I’m a visual person so being able to see the envelope helps me understand how the signal is being processed. This will become a part of my arsenal for sure.

Kilohearts Transient Shaper Features

Attack

The amount of amplification or attenuation of the transient.

Pump

The amount of attenuation directly after the transient, emphasizing the transient without increasing the level.

Sustain

The amount of amplification or attenuation of the sustained sound.

Speed

Higher values result in the snappier transient modification, and lower values result in smoother curves.

Clip

When enabled, the output signal is clipped to 0dB.

Sidechain

When enabled transients are detected based on a secondary input, but the effect is applied to the main input.

Settings panel

Whenever you have your mouse cursor over a snapin there is a small arrow at the top right corner (not visible in the screenshot). It opens a settings panel where you handle presets. It also has a “randomize” button that can be useful. I guess…

Enabled checkbox

The small checkbox to the left of the plugin name is a checkbox that bypasses the effect when disabled.

Resize handle

The bottom right corner of all Kilohearts plugins is a resize handle for scaling the UI to any size. This allows you to get a good view of the controls whatever the screen resolution, and also comes in handy if you need big controls, e.g. when using Transient Shaper as a real-time effect on a touchscreen monitor during a live set. (Not available when used inside a snapin host.)

Kilohearts Transient Shaper is a snapin

Kilohearts plugins work great together, and all the snapins can work double duty as modular components inside our snapin hosts. There are several different hosts that allow you to apply any number of snapins in various contexts, like to each individual band in the band-splitter Multipass, or add your full effects chain right inside the preset of the synth Phase Plant.

All Kilohearts plugins are available through the installer as 64-bit VST, AU, and AAX plugins for Windows and Mac. Most of them are also available for Reason Studios Reason, but if you are a Reason user you have to get your plugin through the Reason Studios Shop.

Snapins Manual

The Kilohearts Toolbox

The snapins work best together and the Kilohearts Toolbox offers heavy bundle discounts. Divided into tiers so you can start out with what suits you the best!