Sonnox Oxford TransMod Native

The Transient Modulator allows dramatic manipulation of signal transients. It can completely exaggerate or dampen the attacks, with continuous variation between all settings. A 'soggy' drum kit can be brought to life, or a bass made to sound more punchy. Conversely, it can bring up the ambience surrounding a specific sound by softening the attack. The TransMod can give life to dull sounding recordings, without the unwanted changes in overall timbre associated with compression.

The application was developed to address the common situation where there is a need to selectively tighten up percussive instruments or soften the unwanted percussive effects of acoustic musical instruments. Such effects are easily achieved with the Transient Modulator because its purpose-designed adaptive processing acts on differential information in the program so that the overall long-term program level is minimally affected and sensitivity to control parameters is drastically reduced.

The functions of the Transient Modulator are adaptive and totally dependent upon dynamic level changes within the signal. In other words, it will have no effect on a steady state signal, such as a continuous tone which does not change in level. Any control signals it develops are purely dependent upon the extent and rate of change of signal levels.

Gain,Threshold & Deadband

When the RATIO fader is set positively, significantly larger peak levels can be produced, with potential to increase them up to 24dB greater than the original signal. Conversely, negative ratio values can reduce the overall levels significantly, therefore the GAIN fader has been designed to operate over a considerable range.

Unlike the rest of the processing in the Transient Modulator, the THRESHOLD knob sets an absolute value. Other processing is tracking changes in the waveform and is not related to any absolute setting. In this case, only signals above the THRESHOLD knob setting will be processed. The greater the signal level above the threshold, the greater the effect, the Transient Modulator will have.

The DEADBAND knob sets a window below which transient changes will remain unaffected, preventing unwanted modification to lower level signals.

Ratio & Overshoot

The RATIO fader sets the amount of instantaneous change, positive or negative, to the signal. As an example, if the RATIO fader is set to +1.00, and a signal peak 10dB above the average occurs, the Transient Modulator could increase that to a 20dB peak.

The OVERSHOOT fader sets the period over which dynamics changes occur. The lower values will cause just the initial transients and leading edges of signal changes to be affected. Whereas longer values will increasingly have more affect on the later portions of signal changes. 

Rise Time, Recovery & Overdrive

The RISE TIME knob sets the detector response time. The shortest setting will cause all transients to be processed, whereas longer settings will progressively exclude the shorter and initial transients.

The RECOVERY knob sets the longer term time for the envelope processing which is adaptive according to the signal present. Lower settings allow the processing of virtually all transients, even in quick succession, whereas longer settings will progressively exclude small rapid transients. 

Increasing the OVERDRIVE fader setting will add musically related harmonic content, generated when high levels of modulation occur. When set at 100%, the overdrive process will allow peaks of up to 6dB greater than digital maximum to be included without the sound of hard clipping, and still avoiding digital overloads entirely.