Point

Point is the Airwindows transient designer! It’s tricky to use, but powerful.

For starters, try putting it on some drum like a kick or snare, set Point to -1.0 (all the way to the left) and then set reaction speed to 0.160 or so. You’ve got an instant squashed mega-compressed drumkit! Hair metal for days.

Now take reaction speed to 0.24 or thereabouts. You should be able to hear a big pillowy front end come on to the wave, very Pink Floyd.

Now drop it to around 0.120 with care. Suddenly it’s a funk drumkit, super close-miked, all attack! The cymbals in particular get ridiculously attacky. You can blend between these tones all day, and that’s all just with Point at -1.0… with LACK of point.

If you intend to fool with positive Point, you’re probably going to want to whack the input gain way down, like -12. But then you’ll find that reaction speed of around 0.2 to 0.4 give you an outlandish spike on the kick drum. Cymbal attacks live around 0.6 to 0.7 on the reaction speed.

If I was going to set up a multimiked drum kit entirely with Point, I’d try -1.0 Point with speed 0.16 on the rooms or overheads. Same on the snare mic, faster for Floyd and slower for funk. Kick would get padded and a positive Point at around 0.3 depending whether I wanted click or whack, and if I had a hi-hat mic I’d probably mix it in super low, but give it positive point at around 0.6 just to bring out that little spike.

Point will blow up your mixbuss if you treat it wrong: know what you’re doing and be careful of positive settings. But, it’s very powerful all the same. And yes, it’s a freebie too.