Tighten Up Your Drum Sounds with NI Battery 4

There are many ways to dynamically and tonally process your drum sounds. This is because we have numerous valuable tools ranging from compressors and harmonic enhancers to special equalizing techniques. Moreover, I would like to highlight one of these tools called Transient Shaper. I feel that Transient Shaper plugins provide a way to shape the amplitude response of a signal in a better and, in most cases, cleaner' way than traditional compressors do. This tool possesses two main controls: attack and decay.  

Dynamic Drums

The ability to sharpen or soften the sound and control the length or shorten the decay has proven helpful for giving each sound the right size and position in the overall mix. For instance, by increasing the release parameter by singing it on a drum loop that is too tight and lifeless, you can make it sound more vibrant and fatter instantly. On the other hand, shortening the decay (attack) of the drum loop that was processed with too much reverb can make it much cleaner and sit way better in the mix.  

Transient Shaping

Let me try to give you a closer look at one of Transient Shaper's tools I find particularly useful. After opening a new instance of SoundBridge, I added a unique MIDI channel where I placed Battery 4 by Native Instruments. After loading the chosen samples into cells, I made a drum kit (Drum & Bass in this case) and some basic rhythm.

Here is how the whole, unprocessed drum loop sounds.

~Drum Loop Unprocessed

In my opinion, it's a great thing to have the possibility to treat individual samples in the drum kit as well as to use it as a master effect within Battery 4. First, let us try applying it on the kick and snare drum. By navigating down from the sample cells section, you will find the 'Effects' tab. Moreover, the Transient Shaper effect is located inside the 'Effects' tab to the right, named 'TM.'

Let's now hear how the kick and snare drum sound without and with the effect.

~Kick Drum & Snare Drum Unprocessed

~Kick Drum & Snare Drum Processed

You can hear a considerable difference after increasing the attack and slightly decreasing the release. To conclude, let's hear how the entire drum loop with all of the drum elements sounds without the Transient Shaper and after that with it. This time, I will use it as a master effect.

~Full Drum Loop without TM

~Full Drum Loop with TM