In Craig Anderton’s Harmony Central Pro Review Peter Gorges ( Director – Digidesign A.I.R. Group) stopped by with some tips from the developers of Transfuser, the new realtime groove manipulating, beat mangling, really cool effecter plugin for Pro Tools.
Tips from Paul Kellett:
- Insert a reverb effect before the Gater effect. This fills in any gaps in the audio so makes the gating effect stronger, and is especially good on an Audio Input track used as a send effect for your other tracks in Pro Tools
- For a vintage drum-machine sound, insert the Lo-Fi effect, switch on Anti-Alias and adjust the Sample Rate to between 8 and 16 kHz. This will add a vintage “crunch” without the hard edge of normal bitcrusher/decimator effects.
- Load a vocal sample into a Phrase track (or any sound that is both pitched and rhythmic), switch Tempo Sync OFF and adjust the speed knob to zero or a very low value. Now move the sample start marker while playing to find interesting textures within the sample. The different Mode settings will also play the sample with different textures.
- Crossfade between drum sounds with velocity: In the Drums module, load samples into both “Sample A” and “Sample B”. Then on the Amp tab set the Vel knob to 100% for one sample and -100% for the other. [check terminology matches user guide]
- Add a sub-octave using the BeatCutter effect as a send. Turn down Repeat, Reorder, Gate and Freeze, but set Scratch to 100% and “Oct Down” Type.
Tips from Mario Reinsch:
- Applying complete FX sections to an existing track
Many of the the tracks you find in the tracks folders have complex and perfectly worked out FX sections. To apply their complete sections to an existing track browse to a folder you expect to have tracks with cool fx settings, such as “Percussive Textures” and drag one of the tracks, dropping it onto the fx section of the existing track. You will find TF extracting all FX settings and applyig them to your track. Notice that in a similar way you can copy FX section between existing tracks.
- Burn audio
If you prefer to work with Audio rather than MIDI-triggering loops, just replace MIDI-triggered Transfuser tracks by audio – using the Recorder Module:
Once you’ve created a bunch of loops, sequences and variations for your song in Transfuser (which may already be ALL the material for your song), solo a track, start playing inside Transfuser and drag the result from the recorder module into ProTools. Set an adequate bar length in the recorder before. Repeat for all tracks – done.
Save the TF setting to be able to re-create stuff or add more variations later, then close TF and work with Audio Regions only.
- Use Pumper FX for pumping pads like a “kick in the sidechain”
The Pumper effect was designed specifically for imitating the sound that you get when you feed the kick drum into a compressor’s sidechain. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get creative with it:
Turn off automatic triggering, assign the manual trigger pad to an automation lane and create your own trigger pattern. Or assign it to MIDI and trigger it from ProTools.
- “Never” ending automation variations
To get a “never” repeating automation in track automation, assign 3 parameters like filter, resonance or decay to 3 automation lanes. Use 3 different loop lengths and step (mostly long) resolutions there, and maybe one lane even working in alternating direction.
- Create a DrumSeq pattern from a slice track
In the pattern section of any sequencer you can drag the current pattern data into any others sequencers pattern editor display. If it`s a sequencer of a different type the pattern gets converted intelligently. It`s nice to use this feature to drag any slice track’s MIDI Pattern into a DrumSeq pattern. It will get converted into a sequence with kick, snare, HiHat, OpenHat in the first 4 lanes.
- Using send FX master input for performing dub delays
On the preferences page you`ll find the send FX’ master input dials. In case you like to perform dub delays or similar things to more than one track at once, assign them to a CC, and keep the track’s Send FX Level constant.
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