J. Anthony Allen explains that audio transients are the attack points of sounds, like a snare drum's initial hit. DAWs use transients to detect tempo, create warp markers, and slice drum loops into individual hits mapped to MIDI.
Okay, so when we talk about transients, what we're talking about is attacks, okay? Each of these is a transient, okay? So if you think about like a snare drum, the hit is the transient. If you think about a trumpet and they go ba, that initial is the transient. So transients are important because they essentially give the computer or the software something to latch onto when it's trying to figure out the tempo. So what we've marked here is transients. Transients will come up a lot because it's what the program uses to calculate hits, or it also is what the program uses to calculate slices. And if it's going to chop things up, talk more about that when we talk about sampling. But like, if I go here, for example, and I say warp from here, what it's going to do is it's going to look for all those transients and try to line them up for us. We've already essentially done that. But transients are an important concept. Whenever you see something asking you about transients, they're asking you about attacks. Let me just show you one other thing while we're here. If I go to slice to new MIDI track, this is the kind of chopping it up thing I was mentioning a second ago. It's going to say, how do you want me to slice it up? Now what this is going to do is, is it's going to take. It's going to take our drum loop and chop it up into little pieces and then put it onto a MIDI instrument for us. So it's saying create one slice per, and I can say warp marker. So every warp marker here can say one slice per bar, half note, quarter note, eighth note, or transient. And very often this is the best choice. So transient is going to be attack, right? So every transient make a new slice, okay? So keep an eye out for that word transient, and just remember that it means the attack points.
