Newfangled Audio Articulate

With four stages to play with, Articulate offers a little more control over the attack and sustain of a sound than most other transient shapers.

Newfangled Audio’s Articulate, which is available through Eventide, is authorised using an iLok account, either to your computer or to a physical iLok key, whichever you prefer. It supports the usual plug‑in formats for Mac and Windows DAWs.

So What Is It?

Although Articulate can certainly be used to shape transients, it goes beyond the traditional transient modifier type of plug‑in, and offers the user a control set that’s more akin to a synth’s envelope shaper. It works by splitting the audio info four components, which are designated Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release. The levels of each of these components can then be adjusted before they’re all recombined to create the output signal. Conceptually, then, it’s a simple enough idea, but as a technical achievement it’s far from trivial.

This level of control allows useful adjustments to be made to virtually any sound source that has a defined envelope of its own. For example, you can adjust the pick attack of a guitar or the thwack of a kick drum. The Release component also allows ambiences and reverb tails to be pulled up in level. Articulate can react to audio being fed to its input or to an external side‑chain input, and the latter makes it possible to use Articulate to reduce mix congestion with, essentially, envelope‑specific ducking.

The GUI, which is resizeable, can be set to one of three colour options and has a pleasingly simple layout, with vertical faders for Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release, plus a horizontal fader that adjusts the Separation mode, from Smooth to Focused. Smooth, as its name suggests, produces the smoothest‑sounding results, while Focused offers better‑defined separation between the elements but may sound less smooth with certain material — sometimes this fine control will be precisely what you need, but it’s a setting that’s definitely best judged by ear.

There’s also a Mix parameter box, and this can be used to set the wet/dry balance of the processed and unprocessed signals. Further buttons bypass the plug‑in, enable the side‑chain input and activate a limiter, which is used to keep any output peaks (a risk with any transient‑shaping process) well under control. The four component faders range from fully off to +12dB gain, each also come with Mute, Solo and Off buttons, and there are level meters for both the input and output with peak hold readouts.

Articulate made it easy to tame electric guitar sounds suffering from an over‑strident pick attack.

Shaping Up

This plug‑in provides a very straightforward to way to manipulate sounds that have a naturally fast attack. For example, the Attack control can be used to emphasise or pull back the impact of a kick drum or snare, while the Decay control adjusts the punchiness of the sound, and you have just that bit more control over the result than with a traditional ‘boost or cut’ transient shaper. Similarly, I found that Articulate made it easy to tame electric guitar sounds suffering from an over‑strident pick attack. Pianos and other percussive synth sounds can also be treated. The Sustain and Release controls then allow the tail end of the sound to be adjusted in a similar fashion, to make it anything from dry to very airy.

There are no parameters to adjust that change the duration of the ADSR components, so you’re not able to create slow‑attack sounds of the sort you can with, say, Eventide’s Physion 2, but on the whole Articulate is a very handy and easy‑to‑use tool for changing the character of instruments and drum loops. So easy to use, in fact, that setting up your own treatments with just a handful of controls makes the 50 supplied presets largely unnecessary. Well worth installing the demo.