Transient Shaper allows shaping the dynamics of a sound. With a Transient Shaper you can makes your sound louder, gives it more expressiveness and more punch. A Transient is a high amplitude, short-duration sound at the beginning of a waveform that occurs in phenomena such as musical sounds, noises or speech. In other words, it is the initial hit of a sound. You can use a transient shaper to move and effect the transient. Such as make it hit faster or slower.
The image above shows the original sound at the top left.. Then you can run it through a Transient Shaping VST to move the transient, such as the images example of the other waveforms. You can have more attack, or less. This works can sound like a compressor, but it actually works differently. This can be ideal for individual or summed drums/percussions shaping. You can even use this as a Gate replacement, Transient shapers can really add punch to your kick, and other aspects of your production.
The best free VST for Transient shaping I know of is the Bitter Sweet from Flux. This works for mac and PC. http://www.fluxhome.com/products/freewares/bittersweet-v3
For a paid version I actually really love Isotope Alloy. It’s simple and got a great interface that lets me see what is happening. http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/alloy/
Now that you know the basic idea of a Transient Shaper and where you can get one, you can start adding punch and dynamics to your sound.
