New Music Gear Monday: United Plugins Nanopulse Transient Designer Plugin
Transient designers have come a long way since the early days of analog SPL Transient Designer. Modern transient designer plugins now have far greater capabilities and one of the most sophisticated in this area is the new Nanopulse by JMG Sound and United Plugins.
One of the things that makes Nanopulse different from other transient designers is its unique attack Enhancer section that has 64 transient types that have been captured from a wide variety of sources, such as a snare skin, woodblock, kick beater, glass ping, string pluck, cymbal tap and just about any type of fast transient that you can think of.
After that, Pitch, Tone, and Resonance controls are available that are capable of shifting the pitch of the selected transient type by -24/+24 semitones. By changing the balance of low and high frequencies you can then make the Enhanced Transient darker or brighter and control how much the frequency profile will be smoothed.
There is also a Shaper section where you can sculpt and shape the overall dynamic balance of their sound using a transient shaper with the Low, Mid and High bands, each with control over Attack (affecting the level of the transient signal) and Sustain (affecting the level of the remaining signal — everything minus the transient, in other words). The Cross control adjusts the frequency at which the bands will be split, while Slope selects the crossover type from 6dB, 12dB, and 24dB per octave. As expected, Listen lets users solo single or multiple parts of the divided signal — useful for checking things. These six slider controls allow precise control over sound sculpting and shaping at lightning speed.
There are also three different Detector modes also available for detecting transients. The Smart selection detects transients regardless of their level to generally give the best results; Spectral takes into account tonality to offer very musical results but incurs some latency in doing so; and Fast is slightly less accurate at low levels but can detect multiple transients in quick succession better than the other modes while being least taxing the CPU in doing so.
There are also Input and Output controls over their respective gain levels by -24 to +24 (dB), while an output Limiter feature and a handy Random feature generates random values in the Enhancer.
United Plugins Nanopulse is available for $79 and there’s a full 15 day trial period. You can find out more here or watch the video below for more details.
