Spikes is a transient processor, thanks to it’s intelligent auto settings you need just one knob to manipulate the sound, but if you want to tweak it every control is there at your fingertips.
Working with audio often happens that you need to manipulate peaks and body of the signal, sure you have compressors at your disposal but a compressor needs a fixed threshold to work, a plugin like HoRNet Spikes on the other hand uses a relative threshold so you don’t have to worry about the level of the signal.
The fast peak of a snare or an acoustic guitar is detected using the difference of two envelopes, one with fast attack and the other with slow attack, the resulting signal represents the peak over time. The detected control signal is then applied to a gain stage that reduces or increases the audio level according to the setting of the “spike level” control.
With this simple logic you can change the intensity of every peak relatively to the body level and though increase them to make the sound more “snappy” or decrease them to make it more “full”
The detector logic is the core of the algorithm and while the default settings work most of the times, HoRNet Spikes provides controls for adjusting the “length” of the detected peak and the release of the detector making the plugin react faster or slower to sudden level changes, we added an auto release function that snaps to the song tempo and it’s calibrated to make the most natural sound. Right in front of the detector we placed a 12dB/oct high pass filter that you can use to reduce the weight of low frequencies (such the body of a kick drum or the very low frequencies of a bass guitar) in the detector algorithm.
Using the “spikes level” you control the level of the peaks detected earlier, but this obviously affects
the output level, that why we also have added the auto output option that automatically adjusts the output level to always keep a constant level.
The gain meter shows the applied gain in every moment, and if the gain sweep is too much you can limit it using the two sliders on the gain meter that allow you to set an upper and a lower gain limit.
HoRNet Spikes is available for 12,99 € for Mac OS X and Windows in VST2, VST3, AU, RTAS and AAX plug-in formats on www.hornetplugins.com