LoopTV present this useful tutorial from Oh Drat Digital exploring what Transient Shaping is and how you can use Maschine's onboard FX to shape your kicks and snares, and give them more punch!

Transient shaping is the art of altering the sudden peaks of a piece of audio – for creative or technical purposes. If you’ve ever had a kick sound, or perhaps a guitar – especially one you’ve recorded yourself – that lacks a little bit of ‘thump’, then this transient shaping tutorial will come in handy. Whereas compression works by looking at audio level, transient shaping works by examining the rate of change in audio level.

This means that a transient – a sudden peak in sound – doesn’t have to be a certain volume, it just has to be a certain volume louder than the audio that came immediately before it…Getting the thump of a kick to become more pronounced or the picking of a guitar to be softer then a transient shaper can save you a huge amount of time!

There are tons of transient shapers, both in hardware and software. Native Instruments Maschine 1.8 now has a built in version of the Guitar Rig based Transient Master plugin, which is looked at here in the video. Propellerhead Reason has a transient shaper built into the Kong Drum Designer, and Logic, Cubase, and plenty more software have included transient shapers. If you don’t have one of those, or you want to try something new, then look no further than the FREE transient shaper from FLUX available in the free area of Pluginboutique.com