Guitars are percussive instruments, but we like sustain, so we’ll compress, amplify, overdrive and crunch to make the guitar’s sound persist. The downside: With that much amplification, the initial transient from the pluck of a string can overwhelm compressors, amp sims and other effects, which produces a nasty “pop” or “splat” at the note’s beginning.
This issue is most annoying with sustainers. These variations on a compressor use an extremely low threshold and high ratio (Fig. 1), with a hard compressor knee to keep the signal above the threshold longer to increase sustain. After the guitar signal returns below the threshold, there’s a huge pop when you pluck a string as the sustainer grabs the new note to turn it down.
You can reduce these transients slightly by moving the pickups further from the strings. Although this lowers the output, turning up an amp’s drive control can compensate. However, there are more effective ways to minimize initial transients, three of which we’ll examine here.
TRANSIENT SHAPER
This specialized dynamics processor affects a signal’s envelope by emphasizing or softening the initial transient. Typically, an attack control’s center position does nothing. Turning it clockwise emphasizes the attack, while dialing it counterclockwise softens it by ramping up the attack to the full level over a few milliseconds. Some transient shapers include a sustain control that affects the post-attack envelope. However, this doesn’t necessarily change sustain in the same way as a compressor.
Native Instruments’ Transient Master plug-in (Fig. 2) works very well to control guitar transients. You can greatly reduce